meituan dianping

A geek and a curious guy, this is how the Chinese people know, Wang Xing, the founder of Meituan, the biggest Chinese group buying website. Wang Xing is a serial entrepreneur who emerged as one of the successful businessmen in China, even after facing multiple failures and now, he has built the biggest online-to-offline market in China. Also known as ‘Big Brother Xing’, he has been giving its rival, Alibaba’s Ele.me, a tough competition.

Wang Xing was born on 18 February 1979, in Longyan, to a Chinese businessman Wang Miao, the owner of a cement factory located in the city of Longyan in Fujian. Wang Xing completed a bachelor’s degree in electronics engineering from Tsinghua University in 2001.

Having born into a business family, Xing was always into starting up his own business. Inspired by the success of Facebook in the U.S., he dropped out of the University of Delaware, where he was pursuing a PhD in computer engineering and started his first social network named Duoduoyou. The startup specifically targetted the students in the various university, but like many of other startups, it was unable to make the mark.

The second time, he started Youzitu, that was built to serve the Chinese students abroad. But again the startup got shut down. The next startup that Xing started was Xiaonei that he launched in 2005. This startup also targetted the Chinese students and was the first of his startups, to get thousands of registered users in a small time.

But yet again, Xing faced problems like financial issues in handling the company and had to sell it to InterActive Corp, for US$2 million, only after a year of its inception. InterActive Corp renamed the company to Renren, that later raised US$740 million, in its IPO in 2011.

Having earned enough money in the deal, Xing was able to perceive a new startup idea and launch another social media app, which actually was a micro-blogging app inspired by Twitter, named Fanfou. This time, the startup went very well and had gained over 2 million user base. But then, in 2009, Government ordered to shut down the social network as a result of violent discussions that took place over the platform about the Ürümqi riots. But eventually, after a small time gap, Xing re-opened Fanfou and is still an active participant on this platform.

Even having faced many failures in his past start-ups, Xing never became discouraged and pushed his limits even further. In 2010, he came up with his another startup, Meituan, a group buying a website for local food delivery services, consumer products and retail services. Xing received the initial funding of worth $12 million for the startup from Sequoia Capitals. This startup again was inspired by another US-based company named Groupon and sold discount vouchers on various services and deals.

The company is backed by Tencent and is one of the biggest on-demand services providing platforms. By the year 2014, the company had employed over 5,000 people, and in 2015, it had registered over 200 million users. The company operates in 2800 cities in China and has partnered with 400,000 local Chinese businesses.

On 8 October 2015, Meituan merged with a Chinese group buying site named Dianping, and the merger became Meituan Dianping. In January 2016, the company raised $3.3 billion worth of funding. Meituan Dianping went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2018 at a price HK$69 per share.

Wang Xing has always stressed on enhancing the efficiency and in fact, has done the same in the past fifteen years. Currently, he serves Meituan Dianping as the chairman and is also the member of the board at Beijing Mobike Technology Co Ltd. He is an avid reader and also writes blogs on topics like entrepreneurship, philosophy, etc.

In 2018, Xing was at number 37 in the Forbes China Rich List 2018 and at number 379 in the Forbes Billionaires 2019 with an estimated worth $4.1 billion. He was also listed number three on the Forbes 2018 “40 under 40” list.