Meituan Dianping, a Chinese e-commerce giant backed by various investors including Booking Holdings and Tencent, reported that its total revenues increased by 97.2% to RMB 19.1 billion in the third quarter of 2018 from RMB 9.7 billion in the same period of 2017.
Negative adjusted EBITDA and adjusted net loss were RMB 1.2 billion and RMB2.5 billion, respectively.
Total gross transaction volume (GTV) grew by 40.0% to RMB 145.7 billion in the quarter from RMB 104.1 billion in the same period of 2017. Annual transacting users grew by 30.3% to 382.3 million in the twelve months ended September 30, 2018 from 293.4 million in the twelve months ended September 30, 2017.
In-store, hotel & travel businesses as a whole recorded a GTV of RMB 49.3 billion in the third quarter, up by 13.9% from RMB 43.3 billion in the same period of last year. The monetization rate increased to 9.0% from 7.0%, which was primarily due to the increasing contribution of online marketing revenue.
As a result, revenues from in-store, hotel & travel businesses in the three months increased by 46.8% to RMB 4.4 billion from RMB 3.0 billion in the same period of 2017, accounting for 23.3% of the company's total revenue.
Meituan said that the segment's revenue growth was primarily due to:
(i) The increase in the number of active merchants as well as the average revenue per active merchant of the in-store, hotel & travel businesses;
(ii) The increase in the number and the average daily rate of domestic room nights sold.
For the hotel booking business, the number of domestic room nights increased by 34.8% to 76.1 million in the three months ended September 30, 2018 from 56.4 million in the same period of 2017. In addition, the average daily rate of the domestic room nights sold on the platform also increased steadily.
Meituan has sold a total of 209.6 million domestic hotel room nights in the first three quarter of 2018. By comparison, the company marked 200 million room nights stayed in 2017 at 11 o'clock on December 26.
Booking Holdings, the world's largest online travel group, reported 201.3 million room nights sold in just one quarter this year.
In May 2018, Meituan claimed that it has recorded a monthly room-night number higher than that of its rival Ctrip. Meituan had 22.7 million hotel room nights in March, while Ctrip and affiliated Qunar and Tongcheng-Elong together had 22.4 million room nights in the same period, according to data from controversial research firm Trustdata.
