業績會第一現場

was live · ·

美团2026Q2业绩直播

Key Takeaways (AI-Generated)

财务表现

- 第二季度总收入同比增长14.4%至1046亿元人民币

- 净利润转正，调整后净利润达25亿元人民币

- 核心本地商务板块收入达715亿元，同比增长10.1%

- 新业务板块收入增长25%至331亿元人民币

业务进展

- 外卖业务恢复正增长，订单结构和用户质量改善

- 小象超市扩展至68个城市，GTV持续强劲增长

- Keeta在香港和沙特实现盈利，沙特仅用22个月达到盈利

- 发布Long Cat 2.0，700亿参数基础模型在中国基础设施上训练

下一季度业绩指引

- 预计第三季度外卖单位经济效益同比显著改善但面临季节性逆风

- 2026年新业务板块亏损不会超过2025年水平

- 到店业务营业利润率因第三四季度投资增加可能下降

机会

- 市场扩张：生鲜零售在线渗透率低，扩展至近400个县市有巨大增长潜力

- 产品创新：AI技术整合业务运营，包括AI助手小川和商家专用AI代理

- 运营效率：持续改善营销效率和运营执行转化为更好单位经济效益

风险

- 市场竞争：到店业务竞争加剧，竞争对手通过专用应用大量补贴

- 经济波动：宏观逆风影响某些品类平均订单价值和消费模式变化

- 运营中断：第三季度旺季面临季节性逆风，极端天气需更高配送成本

Full Transcript (AI-Generated)

Operator

Thank you for standing by and welcome to the Meituan Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. All participants are in a listen only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question and answer session. If you wish to ask a question, you will need to press the star key followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to hand the conference over to Scarlett Xu, VP of Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Scarlett Xu

Thank you, operator. Good evening and good morning, everyone. Welcome to our second quarter of 2026 earnings conference call. Joining us today are Mr. Xin Wang, Chairman and CEO and Mr. Xiao Hui Chen, Senior Vice President and the CFO of Meituan. For today's call, management will first provide a review of our second quarter of 2026 results and then conduct a Q and A session.

Before we start, we would like to remind you that our presentation contains forward-looking statements, which include a number of risks and uncertainties and may differ from actual results in the future. This presentation also contains unaudited non IFRS Accounting Standards financial measures that should be considered in addition to, and not as a substitute for measures of the company's financial performance prepared in accordance with IFRS accounting standards.

For a detailed discussion of risk factors and non IFRS Accounting Standard measures, please refer to the disclosure documents in the IR section of our website. Now I will turn the call over to Mr. Xin Wang. Please go ahead, Xin.

Xin Wang

Thank you, Scarlett and hello everyone. In the second quarter, our total revenue grew 14.4% year over year and net profit turned positive. Both core local commerce and new initiatives delivered solid results. We remain focused on our retail plus Technology Strategy, improving business quality and driving high quality growth across the industry as the go-to local services platform for consumers and merchants.

Our ecosystem continues to strengthen. We push forward with product and business innovations while stepping up investment in our ecosystem and technology to build long term value. We also expanded our grocery, retail and overseas businesses with continued gains in operating efficiency. On the AI front, we made further progress in foundation models as well as in AI agent applications. Now let me walk you through the details.

In the second quarter, the quick commerce industry shifted its focus to improving marketing and operating efficiencies. Against this backdrop, our strong consumer mindshare and core competitive advantages translated into healthy financial results. Order mix and user quality continue to improve steadily for food delivery. Core user stickiness strengthened further with purchase frequency, retention and average order value all trending up.

Meituan Instant Shopping maintained healthy new user acquisition with post 2005 generation growing particularly fast, while existing users also increased their order frequency. Despite a high base from last year and evolving consumption trends, we actively pursued new growth opportunities, improving our supply offerings, strengthening product competitiveness and deepening our understanding of user needs for different consumption scenarios.

For food delivery, King Haw Fund improved its ability to identify consumer demand and accelerated the rollout of hit products from chain merchants. Shenzhou continues to raise the bar on supply quality, catering to mid to high end consumers seeking quality upgrades. We also steadily expanded innovative store formats such as branded satellite stores in Pai Wei Xindian, creating incremental value for merchants.

For Meituan Instant Shopping, Meituan Instant Mart maintained rapid growth and remained a key growth engine. Wenma Supermarket expanded quickly across the majority of provinces in China. We also launched more private label products. In June, we rolled out an anti-counterfeiting verification system to safeguard product authenticity for high end alcohol in Supermarket.

Bien Li also accelerated its market penetration, leveraging customized product development and factory partnerships to enhance product competitiveness and better serve users in nighttime and travel scenarios. We also took more proactive steps to strengthen our platform ecosystem, deepening merchant support and empowerment. We continue to lead the industry in food safety governance and improve courier welfare.

In Q2, we fully rolled out ten key initiatives under the trusted food delivery framework, establishing an end to end food safety system spanning 4 pillars: pre-onboarding screening, in-process monitoring, crackdown on fraud and illicit activities, and collaborative public oversight to address evolving industry needs. We launched the first comprehensive AI solution built for the quick commerce industry.

We also scaled up AI powered tools, helping merchants optimize their online operation efficiency around peak holiday seasons. We supported 220,000 small and medium sized restaurant merchants with funding, operational supplies, equipment upgrades, AI tools and store renovations. In Q2, we also launched a special program to boost demand in lower tier markets and energize county level economies.

In the second half of the year, this program will expand to nearly 400 counties nationwide, helping over half a million small and medium sized merchants digitize their operations. On courier welfare, we have expanded the occupational injury insurance program nationwide, covering every order and every courier. In addition, we continue to refine our algorithms and just recently we pioneered "pause the clock at red light" feature, rolling this out first in Beijing.

Going forward, occupational injury insurance, pension insurance subsidies and our critical illness care program for couriers and their families will together form a robust and comprehensive welfare framework. This quarter, we further strengthened our position as the preferred platform for local services, sustaining high quality growth across our in-store, hotel and travel business.

Despite a changing consumer consumption environment and intensified industry competition, we continued to enrich our supply with more diverse high quality offerings while elevating the overall user experience. Meanwhile, we pushed the industry further from choosing the right merchants to choosing the right artisans and the right experiences.

We saw a clear shift in local services consumption from standardized spending towards more personalized, experiential and emotion driven experiences. Authentic experiences and deep engagement are playing an increasingly important role in consumers' decision making. This quarter we released the new must eat list curated from 1.5 billion authentic user reviews.

It now covers 264 cities and regions globally, with 120 newly added cities. Through genuine user recommendations, more long-standing local restaurants, specialty dining spots and hidden culinary gems are being discovered. The must eat list also continued to expand into more immersive, interactive and interest driven scenarios.

We believe that in the AI era, authentic experiences, authentic reviews and authentic trust will continue to be the most vital infrastructure for the local services industry and we will continue to strengthen our unique advantages in this area. In addition, we are leveraging AI to enhance consumer experience and merchant operations.

For complex local services decisions, consumers increasingly turn to Xiao Chuan, our AI assistant built into the Meituan app. As adoption grows, we are seeing a meaningful lift in user engagement and time spent. We also continue to elevate the consumer experience with integrated services like Pick Up Now, online reservations, advanced online ordering, smart queuing and in-store smart ordering.

These features give consumers a more seamless experience across a wider range of scenarios. Our partnership with Tencent is progressing rapidly with both teams refining the product to deliver faster, more convenient services. Beyond serving consumers, we are extending Meituan's operational expertise across industries through AI agents.

On the Catapult platform, we are rolling out specialized AI agents across restaurant services, retail, medicines and health, and hotels and travel. These AI agents help merchants improve daily operations and drive tangible efficiency gains. This marks our evolving role from merchants' online channel to their AI business partner.

Looking ahead, we want to be more than a platform that connects consumers and merchants. We aim to become a digital copilot for merchants on our platform. Now let's move on to new initiatives. In the second quarter, both grocery retail and Keeta maintained very rapid growth while further improving operating efficiency.

For grocery retail, Xiaoxiang Supermarket accelerated its expansion and now operates across 68 cities. We continue to strengthen our supply chain and enhance our merchandising capabilities with private label products accounting for a growing share of our GTV. We also extended our offline footprint. In July, we opened our 3rd Xiaoxiang supermarket offline store in Hangzhou.

We scaled the Happy Monkey model to serve community scenarios. With 40 stores in operation at end of Q2, for Keeta, we sustained strong growth momentum alongside continued efficiency gains by market. Hong Kong has reached stable profitability. The Middle East delivered further sequential improvement in operating efficiency. In Brazil, we focus on Sao Paulo market.

Going forward, we will continue to leverage our strengths in product, technology and operations to deliver a superior consumption and delivery experience to Keeta users. Reflecting on the second quarter, our focus was on building core operational capabilities. We continue to enhance supply quality, expand consumption scenarios and deliver high quality growth while steadily improving efficiencies.

Looking ahead, we see broad room for growth across the industry. Many niche local service needs remain underserved. And there is still significant potential to elevate service experience and operating efficiency. We'll move decisively to capture these growth opportunities, continuously iterating on our products and services and actively deploying AI in real world consumption scenarios.

Our goal is to further extend our competitive edge in supply diversity, user experience and operational efficiency. At the same time, we remain committed to our social responsibilities, strengthening food safety governance, improving courier welfare and empowering small and medium sized merchants. We will continue to drive the industry toward higher quality and more sustainable development.

With that, I will turn the call over to Xiao Hui for an update on our latest financial results.

Xiao Hui Chen

Thank you, Xin. Hello everyone. With the on-demand industry gradually shifting to efficiency improvements, our focus on operational execution and structural advantages translated into meaningful financial improvements. Revenue growth accelerated and the business turned profitable in Q2. Now let's look at our financial results in details. All comparisons are on a year over year basis unless otherwise noted.

Total revenue grew by 14.4% to RMB 104.6 billion this quarter. Cost of revenue ratio edged down to 66.5%. The accelerated revenue growth and better controlled cost ratio were both primarily driven by improved marketing efficiency. This reflected our continued focus on quality growth amid the dynamic and competitive environment.

Selling and marketing expenses ratio also went down to 23.6%, mainly due to more disciplined marketing spending. R&D expenses ratio increased to 7.3% as we increased investment in AI, while the G&A expenses ratio remained stable at 3.1%. We turned profitable this quarter with total segment operating profit and adjusted net profit reaching RMB 3.9 billion and RMB 2.5 billion respectively.

As of the end of June, we held cash and cash equivalents and short term treasury investments totaling RMB 168.3 billion. As of June 30th, our investment portfolio was nearly RMB 77.3 billion. Separately, fair value changes in certain of our investments resulted in an RMB 22.2 billion gain recognized in other comprehensive income rather than P&L this quarter.

We will be thoughtful and disciplined about evaluating exit opportunities for our investment portfolio along the way to provide more capital resources for our business and for shareholder return. Now let's look at the segment results, starting with the core Local Commerce segment. Revenue reached RMB 71.5 billion in Q2 with year over year growth accelerating to 10.1%.

Delivery service revenue and merchant service revenue both picked up growth pace during this quarter, while product sales delivered solid year over year growth of 78.9%. We are pleased to see our food delivery return to positive year over year revenue growth this quarter. Our strategic focus on higher AOV order segments, user base and operational efficiency continues to bear fruit.

We improved our leadership in both order volume and GTV this quarter. A healthier order mix has driven year over year recovery in our food delivery net AOV. We also improved our marketing efficiency. However, the industry subsidy levels are still well above where they were in 2024 and we expect normalization will take time as the market evolves.

On Meituan Instant Shopping, it continued to deliver steady growth with revenue growing faster than order volume on a year over year basis. This was primarily driven by two factors: the rapid expansion of our 1P business and strong advertising traction as more retail brands allocate marketing budget to our platform.

Revenue of our in-store hotel and travel business also grew steadily and we continue to lead in core categories, trending toward profitability. Segment operating profit turned profitable to RMB 5.7 billion this quarter. On-demand delivery unit economics turned positive with our UE across both food and non-food categories staying far ahead of the industry.

The significant sequential improvements in UE was driven by seasonal tailwinds and meaningful subsidy reduction with our strategic focus on high quality growth and ROI driven resource allocation. Our in-store hotel and travel business also improved its operating profit margin sequentially despite intensified industry competition. All of these gains more than offset our increased investments in brand marketing and promotional expenses.

Now turning to our new initiatives segment, revenue in Q2 was up 25% to RMB 33.1 billion. Segment operating loss narrowed sequentially to RMB 1.7 billion. The rapid expansion of our grocery retail business contributed meaningfully to the segment's revenue growth. While losses from grocery retail increased quarter over quarter on a fast growing business scale, we continue to see steady operational efficiency gains across the board and its margin also improved quarter over quarter.

Growth momentum across Hong Kong and the Middle East remains strong. The losses narrowed quarter on quarter as operational efficiency improved across Hong Kong and the Middle East markets. Hong Kong is now profitable on a sustained basis and unit economics in the Middle East continue to trend in the right direction.

After navigating an intense competitive environment over the past year, the results we are seeing today demonstrate our execution capability on quality growth and operational efficiency improvement. The path forward is about compounding our advantages in products, services, technology and ecosystem so that we can deliver more value to all stakeholders. We will remain deeply committed to our long term potential. With that, we are now open for Q&A. Thank you.

Operator

If you wish to ask a question, please press *1 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press *2. If you are on a speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask your question. The first question today comes from Thomas Chong with Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Thomas Chong

Hi, good evening. Thanks management for taking my questions. How does management view the competitive landscape in food delivery and quick commerce space? Specifically, what trends are you seeing in Meituan's market share within the mid to high AOV order segment? And looking into Q3, as industry subsidies gradually normalize, how do you expect the unit economics for food delivery to trend sequentially versus Q2? Thank you.

Xin Wang

Thank you, Thomas for the question. Let me first share some thoughts on where we see the food delivery industry is heading. First of all, we are seeing a shift across the industry toward greater focus on marketing and operational efficiency. We believe competition will gradually shift back to what really matters: quality, service and innovation.

Regulators provided further guidance on subsidy practices that will drive healthier industry development and create a fair field for companies with genuine core competence, and we are already seeing that play out. Over the past few months, our advantages across user mix, order mix and operational efficiency have continued to strengthen.

We've extended our lead in both order volume and GTV on a sequential basis, particularly in the mid to high AOV segment. Our focus on enhancing membership benefits, expanding premium supply and elevating service quality are paying off. We are seeing deeper engagement and stronger mindshare among premium users for our brand.

For Meituan Instant Shopping, we also maintain our industry leading position. Quick commerce has fundamentally reshaped consumer expectations around convenience and reliability. It is an irreversible lifestyle shift with adoption still at an early stage. Across different consumer groups, we see a significant long term opportunity ahead.

While we recognize the pressure from a high base last year and a broader macro environment, we focus on strengthening our operational capability to build a solid foundation for high quality, sustainable growth in the long term. Over the years, we built a diversified quick commerce supply network spanning a wide range of offline retailers and dark stores and that's the solid foundation for us to meet evolving consumer needs and drive broader adoption of on-demand consumption over time.

Going forward, we will keep investing in product competitiveness, supply chain integration and supply diversity to deepen our consumer mindshare across different categories. On Q3 outlook, we expect food delivery unit economics to improve meaningfully year over year, but it will still be impacted by seasonality on a sequential basis.

Even so, we expect UE to stay positive in Q3 as we continue to optimize operational efficiency. Specifically, the industry subsidy level is still much higher than 2024 level and it will take a few quarters to normalize. At the same time, seasonal headwinds will weigh meaningfully on our UE.

As we mentioned before, Q3 is the peak season for on-demand delivery driven by summer activity. It's also when we ramp up our marketing spending sequentially to capture the highest demand window of the year. We will also provide additional subsidies to our couriers to ensure our delivery service quality through the peak season and on extreme hot weather conditions.

As such, delivery costs per order in Q3 will be higher than that in Q2. On top of that, the occupational injury insurance began its nationwide rollout on July 1st, which adds another cost layer. However, I want to highlight that the near term UE fluctuations are primarily driven by seasonality and our proactive strategic decisions to balance scale, profitability and ecosystem.

We are very confident to sustain our market leadership and stay far ahead on UE across both food and non-food categories and that confidence is grounded in our improving user mix and operational efficiency. Our ongoing investment in the ecosystem is also deepening our moat. In fact, under the current market environment, we are in a good position to focus on our strategic priorities that matter most over the long term.

Our UE recovery has clear visibility and it will gradually get back to a reasonable level in the medium to long term. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. The next question comes from Ronald Keung with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Ronald Keung

Thanks. Good evening, management. I want to ask about your AI side on Long Cat 2.0. Now it's been open sourced and being rolled out internally. How does management think about its role in your broader AI strategy? And beyond internal efficiency, is there a path to commercializing the LLM? And how should we think about the financial impact of AI investments near term versus medium to longer term? Thank you.

Xin Wang

Thank you, Ronald. I will begin with Long Cat 2.0 is an important foundation for our AI strategy, but what we are really focusing on is evolving our AI to bridge the digital and physical worlds and doing so deeply made as competitive moat in local services over the long term. So for us AI is less about competing on the models, it's more about leveraging AI to reshape our organization, product and workflow as we have explained in the past.

Meituan's AI strategy has three pillars: building LLM, AI at work and AI in products. Long Cat 2.0 is our next generation in-house foundation model and it's one of the first, if not the first, 70 billion parameter model trained entirely on Chinese infrastructure. So it's open weight and we have rolled out across our core internal needs, including our software development and operations, customer service and AI agents.

Long Cat 2.0 has made significant progress in core agentic capabilities, particularly in coding, reasoning and tool calling and complex task execution. And it has gained positive feedback across the global developer community. We believe AI creates lasting value where it's deeply embedded in real workflow and where it can solve real problems as reliable infrastructure.

Our full stack domestic infrastructure for training and inference gives us a structural advantage in cost and infrastructure control over the long run. On the product side, we continue to upgrade our AI product offerings, including our AI assistant Xiao Chuan built inside the Meituan app. The direction is very clear from understanding complex multi-constraint queries to full agentic task execution.

Ultimately, we want to deliver a seamless closed loop experience that takes the users from discovery and decision making all the way through to transaction and fulfillment. The key is making this deeply integrated with the real world local services scenarios. On the organizational side, AI adoption is deepening and driving productivity across the board.

More of our employees are now using AI tools and AI generated code as a share of the total output continues to climb. At this stage, our priority is to keep building our AI capability, driving real AI adoption across our business operations. As I said in the past, we are not going to compete to be a token factory.

Our focus is on using our models and AI products to strengthen our core businesses. We hope to provide a better experience for both users and merchants, while also improving our internal operating efficiency. We will assess our AI strategy with an ROI oriented approach and stay disciplined on capital allocation. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you, Xin. The next question comes from Kenneth Fong with UBS. Please go ahead.

Kenneth Fong

Hi, good evening management and congrats on the strong results. So I have a question on the in-store business. Could management update us on the competitive landscape for in-store? Are you seeing any rational shift towards monetization and profitability among competitors and has the macro headwind been a meaningful drag on the business? And looking into the second half now, how is management balancing growth and margin? And is there a clear path to margin recovery from here? Thank you.

Xin Wang

Thank you, Kenneth for the question on in-store business. The competitive landscape in the in-store sector looks very different today versus a few years ago. The market is much bigger. There are new players, more players and different players. We are seeing market players increasingly differentiate across user groups, consumption scenarios and merchant segments.

For us, our one-stop local service offering and authentic review system are well positioned to deliver value to both users and merchants. Our operating priority is very clear. We are not going after subsidy driven low quality orders. What we are focused on is strengthening our competitive position in core categories and delivering better services to our core users and merchants and to pursue high quality growth and allocate our resources more ROI driven.

Over the past few quarters we've seen competitors stepping up investment in local service space through dedicated share-based apps. They have been subsidizing heavily to redirect traffic from their content driven model to accelerate the adoption of the new app. Aggressive subsidies did bring in many price sensitive users, particularly in lower tier cities, but these users typically show weaker repurchase behavior.

We haven't seen meaningful impact on our core users or our core merchants and our in-store GTV quality and redemption rates continue to run meaningfully ahead of key competitors. While macro has weighed on AOV in certain categories, the local service sector has proven to be quite resilient overall compared to the e-commerce sector.

Online penetration across service retail categories is still relatively low. So there's a long runway ahead. We now serve over 8 million merchants across 200 plus categories and we are still seeing new demand emerging with new consumption scenarios, new service offerings or more merchants looking to go digital.

For example, we are recently seeing categories like sports and wellness and immersive entertainment services accelerate their shift online. So we are still confident about the long term growth trajectory of the in-store business. At the same time, heading into the second half, we are investing further to capture the growth opportunity.

We will continue to strengthen our competitive positioning in core categories, in core user groups and core merchant segments. Beyond that, we will help more local merchants digitize operations. Our goal is to go beyond being a traffic source for merchants. We want to be the platform they run their business on and over time an AI powered partner that helps them operate smarter and grow faster.

At the same time, we will continue to cut low ROI spending and improve our resource allocation efficiency. We will continue to realize the synergy between our in-store business and our quick commerce business. On the margin side, it's likely the operating margin will come down from Q2 due to our increased investment in Q3 and Q4 for our in-store business.

As competition gradually normalizes in the future, we believe our focus on ROI driven investment and operational efficiency will translate into gradual margin improvement over the medium to long term. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. The next question comes from Charlene Liu with HSBC. Please go ahead.

Charlene Liu

Good evening, management and congratulations on an amazing set of results. Thank you very much for taking my question. Could management give us an update on Xiaoxiang Supermarket and Happy Monkey, how they have been tracking recently and where we stand on your omni-channel strategy. Are there any updates on expansion plans from here? Thank you.

Xin Wang

Thank you. First, let's be clear. The mission of Meituan has always been to help people eat better and live better. We believe more and more people will order food online. But people will still want to cook for themselves, they just need to buy groceries. So that's why we consider both Xiaoxiang Supermarket and Happy Monkey to be a very important part of our grocery retail.

Grocery retail is deeply aligned with our mission and therefore they are one of our key strategic priorities in the past decade and over the next decade. It will take a long time to do it right. Online penetration here is too low and we see a significant growth opportunity ahead. But we believe the right approach is to do omni-channel and bring both online and offline stores on the same platform.

On-demand retail is gradually changing how consumers shop for groceries. In the past, people used to visit wet markets in the morning or stock up at very large supermarkets or warehouse membership stores every week or every few days. Now more and more consumers are adopting on-demand delivery services. They just order what they need when they need it because they are confident that they can get it within 30 minutes.

So once this habit is established, their purchase frequency goes up significantly over time. We believe the long term consumption potential per user will be very substantial. Talking about Xiaoxiang supermarket, we continue to accelerate our coverage expansion in Q2. Now Xiaoxiang operates in 68 cities. The GTV growth remains very strong and we are seeing steady improvement in operating efficiencies.

As we are committed to executing our omni-channel strategy, we are also actively exploring Xiaoxiang's offline stores. We opened our first offline store in Beijing last December. We opened our second in Ningbo in April and the third in Hangzhou in July. In August, we opened the 4th store in Ningbo and the fifth one in Shenzhen exactly today.

We believe the online backend store allows us to scale up across cities quickly and cover most of our targeted consumers. Meanwhile, a select number of offline flagship stores will also play a very important role in the overall ecosystem. Walking into our offline stores, consumers can see, they can smell, and they can touch the products, and that sensory experience is something they cannot get from a digital screen.

It builds strong trust in both our products and brands, and in-store shopping naturally exposes consumers to a much broader range of products. Over time, we hope this omni-channel strategy will help Xiaoxiang become one of the most trusted and recognized grocery brands in China. Next, let's talk about Happy Monkey, and that's our neighborhood grocery format.

As of Q2, we have opened 40 Happy Monkey stores. Like Xiaoxiang's offline flagship store, Happy Monkey is built around a different value proposition. It has a much smaller, more flexible store format with a high private label mix and curated SKU selection focused on delivering strong value for money products within local communities.

We see these two businesses as differentiated complementary models. However, Happy Monkey is still at a very early stage and we will continue to refine our operational merchandising capability as we move forward. Regarding our long term investment plans, we believe the true moat in grocery retail is organizational and supply chain capabilities.

These take time to build, but once in place they unlock a very large addressable market. What gives us confidence is that consumer demand for high quality grocery products is far beyond top tier cities. Many consumers in mid-sized cities and even counties in more developed regions have good consumption power. They also have strong demand for better products, especially for groceries.

This is also why we are exploring different grocery models to better serve different cities and different consumer needs. Going forward, we will continue to strengthen our merchandising capability and deepen our supply chain collaboration across our grocery retail businesses to build a more differentiated advantage. There are significant long term opportunities for us in this space and we will grow these businesses in a disciplined and sustainable way. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. The next question comes from Gary Yu with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Gary Yu

Hi, thank you management for the opportunity. Could you please give us some update on Keeta? It looks like Keeta's traffic and app downloads have continuously been increasing. How are you thinking about the expansion pace and also investment budget for Brazil? And more broadly, how should we think about the overseas investments in the second half? Thank you.

Xin Wang

Thank you, Gary. Before getting into Brazil, I think we can take a review of the markets we entered earlier because the progress we have seen there has proven our operational approaches in overseas markets. In Hong Kong, we launched Keeta in May 2023. UE turned profitable in October 2025. So it took us about 29 months to reach that milestone.

In our second market, Saudi Arabia, we entered the market in September 2024 and I'm very glad to report that it has already turned profitable in July this year. That means it took us 22 months to get to that milestone, so even faster than Hong Kong. What's more important here is that Saudi Arabia is a much bigger market than Hong Kong and we were unfamiliar with the local market at the beginning, but we were able to ramp up even faster and get to profitability faster.

Against all kinds of headwinds, this showed that our operational approach can scale well across different overseas markets. I think the key here is to stay focused on the fundamentals. Consumer emergency needs are actually quite consistent across different markets. In every market consumers care about better selection, better price, more reliable fast delivery, while merchants care about incremental order volumes, fair commission rates and reliable fulfillment services.

Our goal has always been on creating incremental value for both sides and that's how we can ultimately build trust and a real edge in the market. For Brazil, I believe it's a very attractive market to explore over the long term because Brazil is one of the top five food delivery markets globally and the market is still growing rapidly and it's still significantly under-penetrated.

However, this market is quite different from the other markets we have entered. We will stay flexible and iterate our strategy as we gain more experience on the ground. For now, we will stay focused on Sao Paulo which already makes up 25% of Brazil's overall food delivery market. We want to improve our operations there and to build a differentiated competitive edge before broader expansion.

Regarding the investment pace in the second half of this year, the focus will be on operational optimization and efficiency gains in our existing markets. For our investment in both Keeta and grocery retail businesses, we expect the loss of our new initiatives segment in 2026 will not exceed that in 2025. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. The next question comes from Ya Jiang with Citi. Please go ahead.

Ya Jiang

Hi, good evening, management. Congrats on a great quarter. My question is that as food delivery competition shifts toward efficiency, how should we think about your capital allocation priorities going forward and how are you balancing investment across different businesses, AI related CapEx and shareholder returns? Would you consider monetizing some of your investment assets for buybacks? Should we expect that to continue? Thank you.

Xiao Hui Chen

Thank you for the question. On capital allocation, we have always been ROI driven and anchored in long term value creation. Core business comes first. We are committed to sustaining their high quality growth and leading market position. From there, we dynamically evaluate the investment for other initiatives and direct resources toward areas that matter most to our long term development.

We don't think irrational competition is sustainable for core local commerce. We will stay focused on high quality growth and operating efficiency improvements. For overseas expansion, Keeta has already shifted focus toward operational optimization in Hong Kong and Saudi. We will continue to pace our expansion in each country based on our learnings.

On grocery retailing, we are excited about Xiaoxiang Supermarket's long term potential and we are confident to drive its continued efficiency gains. AI is a very important strategic opportunity, but we are being very deliberate about where and how we invest. Our focus is on embedding AI into real business scenarios to improve user experience, merchant operating efficiency and organizational productivity.

We have no plan to compete aggressively for token factory business. On shareholder returns, share buyback has always been our main approach to return capital to our shareholders. We have executed meaningful buybacks over the past few years and we will continue to do so based on the competitive environment, cash flow and offshore capital availability.

On the investment assets, we will evaluate monetization of our high quality investment portfolios on a regular basis. We hold stakes in some truly outstanding companies. At current valuations, our stakes in these companies are worth more than RMB 70 billion. Beyond the financial returns, some of our investments also offer meaningful strategic value.

They give us deeper insight and allow us to stay close to frontier technology development. Going forward, we will weigh market conditions, valuation, funding needs and our broader capital allocation priorities. When the time is right, we are very open to exit or monetize selected positions to free up capital. It will give us greater flexibility to reinvest in our own business and return value to shareholders. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. There are no further phone questions at this time. I'll now hand the call back to Scarlett Xu for closing remarks.

Scarlett Xu

OK, Thank you everyone for joining our call. We look forward to speaking with you next quarter. Thank you very much for your support.

Operator

That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.

Details at MEITUAN-W IR

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