Meituan's net profit turns from profit to loss, increasing investment in artificial intelligence

Stock Times Reporter Chen Xiachang

On March 26, Meituan released its Q4 and full-year 2025 earnings. The financial report shows that Meituan achieved a total revenue of 364.9 billion yuan in 2025, an 8% increase year-over-year. Due to intensified competition in the instant retail industry, Meituan’s performance shifted from profit to loss, with a full-year net loss of 23.4 billion yuan and an operating loss of 17 billion yuan.

The report indicates that in 2025, Meituan’s core local commerce segment generated 260.8 billion yuan in revenue. To respond to competition in the food delivery industry, Meituan continued to increase direct subsidies to the restaurant sector and introduced innovative supply initiatives such as “Brand Satellite Stores” and “Pin Hao Fan” to meet consumer demand. Notably, in the fourth quarter, the core local commerce segment incurred an operating loss of 10 billion yuan, significantly narrower than in the third quarter.

In 2025, Meituan’s grocery retail and overseas businesses saw strong growth, driving new business segment revenue to 104 billion yuan, a 19% increase year-over-year.

In terms of international expansion, Keeta accelerated its global deployment. After covering Hong Kong, Keeta has now expanded to major countries in the Middle East Gulf region and is operating in Brazil. In Hong Kong, Keeta continued to strengthen its market position and achieved unit economics (UE) positive in the fourth quarter. In new markets such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE, and Brazil, Keeta demonstrated strong growth momentum.

In 2025, Meituan continued to increase AI investment, building a physical-world AI infrastructure and operational capabilities. The company’s annual R&D expenditure reached 26 billion yuan, a 23% increase year-over-year. Based on its self-developed multimodal LongCat series large language models and open-source models, Meituan launched user-facing AI assistants “Xiao Mei” and “Xiao Tuan,” enabling AI technology to be applied in real consumer scenarios. During the Spring Festival holiday, over 100 million users used “Xiao Tuan” to plan dining, entertainment, and shopping activities. “Xiao Tuan” verified information for 700 million merchants nationwide and used 1.3 billion real user reviews for secondary calibration, driving offline consumption growth. Meanwhile, Meituan continued to iterate a series of AI tools for merchants, providing personalized intelligent services. To date, more than 3.4 million merchants have used Meituan’s AI merchant management assistant, effectively reducing operational costs.

Regarding rider protection, which has attracted much attention, Meituan stated that it has taken the lead in implementing nationwide rider pension insurance subsidies and launched the industry’s first comprehensive pension plan covering all types of riders. The Meituan occupational injury protection plan has expanded to 17 provinces and cities nationwide, covering 16 million riders, and continues to improve multi-layered welfare systems in areas such as medical care, education, and housing.

“2025 is a year of both opportunities and challenges for the company. No matter how the external environment changes, Meituan’s strategic direction remains clear,” said Meituan CEO Wang Xing. “We are resolutely ‘fighting against internal competition,’ focusing on doing the right things, and through technological innovation, supply upgrades, and ecosystem co-creation, better serving users and merchants, and striving to fulfill our company mission of ‘helping everyone eat better and live better.’”