Chinese O2O giant reports record daily orders

Chinese online-to-offline (O2O) giant Meituan & Dazhongdianping recorded a record daily high of 11.5 million orders in June, the company announced on Friday.

Formed by the merger of group-buying platform meituan.com and review service provider dazhongdianping.com in October 2015, Meituan & Dazhongdianping offers wide-ranging O2O services from takeaway food to movie tickets.

It said in a statement that it has established partnerships with about 4.32 million vendors. Counting the performance of meituan.com and dazhongdianping.com as separate entities before the merger, the company boasted about 220 million active customers in the last 12 months, with about 180 million using its mobile app to order services.

These figures make it the second-largest e-commerce platform after Alibaba.

China's online retail volume reached 2.24 trillion yuan (335.3 billion U.S.dollars) in the first half of 2016, up 28.2 percent year on year, official data showed on Friday.

Wang Xing, CEO of Meituan & Dazhongdianping, said the Chinese Internet market is entering a new phase of growth which will be powered by service chain expansion and improved quality rather than user base growth.

E-commerce platforms should not only focus on marketing and transactions, but expand to other upstream services, Wang said, noting that the essence of China's "Internet Plus" strategy is improving efficiency and reducing costs of all sectors through integrating the Internet with more industries. Endi