At a time when the low-altitude economy is booming, drone distribution is gradually moving from concept to reality. As a pioneer in this field, Meituan drones have carried out a wide range of operational practices around the world. This article will decrypt Meituan’s drone business in an all-round way, from its development history, technological innovation to operation model, and deeply analyze how Meituan solves the pain points of takeaway delivery through drone technology, as well as the challenges and future prospects it faces in the process.
On a sweltering afternoon in early June, a yellow and black six-winged drone carrying a freshly made KFC set meal took off from the Hong Kong Science Park in Tai Po District, New Territories, Hong Kong, against the blue-gray sea, and flew to the Ma On Shan Promenade on the other side.
Three minutes later, the drone slowly landed on a ground landing site surrounded by blocks with black and white ground markers. The delivery man in Meituan’s uniform took out the meal from the courier box under the drone and handed it to the customers waiting on the side.
Meituan drone flying over the sea of Hong Kong. Source: Meituan
From the Hong Kong Science Park to the Ma On Shan Promenade, this 1.8-kilometer route is the first commercial operation route opened by Meituan drones in Hong Kong. If ground delivery is used, the delivery person needs to travel 7.8 kilometers, which takes about 40 minutes.
At the launching ceremony on June 6, Mao Yiyian, vice president of Meituan and head of the drone business, together with Hong Kong government officials, legislators, and business partners, announced that Meituan drones (known as Keeta drones in overseas markets) have entered Hong Kong.
Meituan has been involved in the drone business for eight years.
In March 2017, Meituan’s daily takeaway orders exceeded 10 million, and capacity bottlenecks began to become prominent. In the same year, Meituan drones took the first step, focusing on forming a team and developing hardware, including drones and ground equipment. In December 2021, Meituan delivered its first drone takeaway in Shenzhen Galaxy WORLD Industrial Park, and began commercial operation the following year.
Drone delivery is not new. In the past 20 years, Amazon and Google abroad, JD.com, SF Express, and Santong Yida in China have all tested the waters. However, their focus is on e-commerce long-tail scenarios, such as remote mountainous areas where ground transportation is difficult to reach, and the timeliness requirements are not high; Meituan is currently the only one that applies drone delivery to takeaway and hopes to greatly shorten the delivery time with the help of drones.
Wang Xing attaches great importance to the drone business. Mao Yianian, the “No. 1 position” of the drone he chose, is his classmate at Tsinghua University, who previously worked at Qualcomm in the United States, engaged in drone entrepreneurship after returning to China, joined Meituan in 2018, and was promoted to vice president of the company in 2023.
By February 2024, Meituan will undergo large-scale organizational restructuring. Wang Xing announced that drones and overseas business report directly to him.
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While polishing products and running through the model, Meituan also tries to remove obstacles to rapid landing in different cities as much as possible. It has obtained the country’s first low-altitude logistics full-territory coverage operation certificate; In Dubai and Hong Kong, similar licenses have been obtained.
Nearly four years later, Meituan drones have entered 7 cities at home and abroad, including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, Nanjing, Dubai, and Hong Kong, opening 55 routes and completing a total of 520,000 orders, expanding the scene to offices, communities, scenic spots, parks, campuses, libraries, etc.
In February this year, Cathie Wood, a well-known American investor known as “Sister Wood”, released the annual report “Big Ideas 2025”. According to her estimates, by the end of 2024, Meituan has completed a total of 400,000 commercial flights, tied for second place with Google Wing, and Zipline (1.32 million).
Today, Meituan has become the largest player in drone takeaway, and it is currently the only player.
But this is a fledgling and far from mature market. Even if Meituan has a whole cake to itself, it still cannot achieve financial self-sufficiency. At the event site of the opening of the Hong Kong route, Mao admitted to Alphabet List (ID: wujicaijing) and others that although Meituan drones charge high delivery fees, they still cannot cover the cost at this stage.
Obviously, this is not a business that can quickly bring large-scale revenue and profits, and it still requires Meituan’s long-term investment.
In a short period of time, the value of drone food delivery is mainly reflected in special scenarios such as mountains and seas, parks and scenic spots, or special needs such as distributing medical samples and urgently needed medicines. This is also the main direction of Meituan’s drone at this stage.
In the long run, the gradual replacement of manual distribution with drones to solve the problems of rising labor costs and upper limit of distribution efficiency is the greatest imagination space for Meituan drones. Especially with new opponents such as JD.com attacking the hinterland, Meituan needs this new story that makes sense and is quite sexy more than ever.
However, drone food delivery requires much more funds than traditional ground delivery; If you rely on a single delivery fee to recover the cost, it is difficult to calculate the account.
Liang Yongfeng is the founder and chairman of Advantage Yongfeng (Shanghai) Venture Capital Fund, focusing on the low-altitude economic track. According to his estimates, the cost of each set of Meituan UAV systems (including drones and ground equipment) ranges from 700,000 to 800,000 yuan to 2 or 3 million. If the data is accurate, such a high upfront investment will pose a great obstacle to the rollout of drone takeaway.
The deeper contradiction is that in the future low-altitude economic system, what role enterprises play and where the business boundaries are, it is still in a blurred area, and there may be many reefs under the water.
In the low-altitude economic boom, some local governments hope that enterprises will take root and “sing”, and have introduced measures to accelerate the development of the UAV industry, and put forward specific goals for route opening, infrastructure construction, and management service platforms. Some places will also give subsidies according to the investment and operation of enterprise infrastructure.
However, the actual situation is that Meituan’s drone, which has been trekking in the “no man’s land” for four years, has only made a big breakthrough in Shenzhen, which has entered the earliest and most open policy environment; Among the 55 routes, more than 40 routes are located in Shenzhen.
A cold reality is that Meituan drones have been launched for eight years and operated for four years, and not only are they still far from profitable and sustainable business models, but they have not yet touched those truly stubborn obstacles. As the player who started the earliest and ran the farthest on the drone delivery track, the road ahead for Meituan drones is not only long, but also full of unknown challenges.
01
What is less known is that in the first year of Meituan’s drone launch in Shenzhen, it was not really “unmanned”.
Yang Junwei is the head of Meituan’s drone operations. According to him, at the beginning of 2021, Meituan only had 10 drones in Shenzhen, equipped with forty or fifty “pilots”. Over-the-horizon flight was not allowed at that time, a driver was required to drive, and the “pilot” lay down in the passenger seat, observing the drone through the roof sunroof, and controlled it using a remote control.
“Wherever the drone flies, the driver and the ‘pilot’ have to follow it, and it has been running like this for a whole year.” He said.
Four years later, this technical obstacle was removed, but the “pilot” was retained to remotely monitor the operational status. When the drone cannot deal with the emergency situation on its own, the “pilot” will take over in time, and each person can monitor no more than 40 drones at the same time.
The training of “pilots” is long. Mao said that he needs at least 12 months of training to be a “pilot” in Meituan’s drone system. “He needs to do everything over again, because the ‘pilot’ has to make a lot of judgments, a lot of information extraction, comprehensive judgment and processing.”
After the opening of the Hong Kong route, Meituan plans to recruit some college students locally, enter the drone business after graduation, first go to Shenzhen for 3~12 months of training (Hong Kong does not have the necessary environment), pass the internal examination, and then return to Hong Kong to work.
To become a “pilot”, the professional background needs to be rigorously reviewed. In addition, Meituan will conduct background reviews on key operating positions, and authorize and audit daily account operations.
In addition to personnel safety, Meituan has also made a secure backup of the hardware system. According to Mao Yianian, Meituan’s Shenzhen remote operation center is equipped with three power grids, as well as two fixed networks and one wireless network, achieving high reliability with high redundancy.
In addition to running through the process and forming a team, Meituan has also spent a lot of effort to cultivate supply and demand in the past four years.
When Meituan drones were first put into operation in 2021, no merchant was willing to cooperate with them. They had to make their own “Big Bear” barbecue rice fast food restaurant. To this day, Yang Junwei still remembers the dishes of “Big Bear” – classic set meals, no meat, balanced meals, and going his own way. Starting from these four takeaway packages, Meituan drones began to build a supply ecology.
With the increase in cooperative restaurants, the “Big Bear” restaurant closed after a few months of operation. “We have tens of thousands of goods in our hands now, and there may be hundreds of thousands or millions in the future, but on the first day we started with four SKUs of our own brands.” Yang Junwei said.
At present, the supply of Meituan drones is mainly large chain merchants, such as KFC, Pizza Hut, Heytea, Baiguoyuan, Naixue’s Tea, 711, etc., and has operated more than 92,000 kinds of goods, covering catering, flash sales, medicine and other categories. In some scenic spots, orders delivered by Meituan drones have accounted for 80% of holiday takeaway orders in some restaurants.
Merchants’ awareness and acceptance of drone food delivery are also improving. In cultivating the most mature Shenzhen, after Meituan opens a drone airport in a local shopping mall, it usually signs in all fifty or sixty merchants in the mall.
But this does not mean that the supply ecology of drone takeaway can quickly expand hundreds or thousands of times with the help of ferocious ground push and merchant subsidies like ordinary takeaways. Its supply expansion must be closely centered on route laying and airport construction.
Taking Hong Kong, which has just opened, as an example, Meituan’s first route of Meituan drones has only 2 merchants in the local area, and it is a one-way route. Mao promised that the drone BD team will soon sign contracts with more merchants. “Technical capabilities are definitely not a bottleneck. The bottleneck is where there are users, where there is demand, and where there is supply from merchants. He said.
On the demand side, Meituan drones have no order target and do not plan to exchange low prices for the market.
Currently, the delivery price of Meituan drones in various cities varies due to cost factors. In domestic cities such as Shenzhen, the delivery fee per order is usually more than ten yuan; In Hong Kong, it is HK$30.
“The pricing includes the cost of drones, batteries, routes, ground personnel, remote operation personnel, etc., which is reasonable for scenarios where riders are not convenient to deliver and their efficiency is relatively low.” Mao Nian said, “At the same time, this is also how we test the authenticity of our requirements.” ”
He emphasized that the charging standard for drone takeaway is not low, so as to cover the cost of ground handling, “pilot”, drone, M-port (take-off and landing airport), charging and swapping stations and other costs as much as possible. “The cost is higher than this, and we hope to use such a delivery fee to see if the user has real needs and whether they are willing to continue ordering in a reasonable delivery location.”
This practice of testing demand by price has achieved certain results. Mao Nian revealed that Shenzhen Galaxy World initially had only one route, and delivered less than 10 orders per day in the first month, which lasted for half a year, and even made the team feel discouraged; Today, the mall has become the busiest site for Meituan’s drones, with seven routes and two or three hundred orders per day.
But at this stage, high-cost drone takeaway does not have an absolute advantage in experience.
Ma Leqi works in Shenzhen and is an account manager of Meixun, an overseas enterprise service company. Not long ago, when receiving a group of foreign technology reporters, she used Meituan’s drone to order a few drinks and delivered them from the nearby business district to the company’s downstairs. She said that the guidance of ordering and picking up food is detailed and the experience is smooth, but there are not many pick-up points at present, the load of each drone is limited, the delivery fee is high, and the speed may not be guaranteed in areas with dense high-rise buildings.
In addition, thunderstorms may lead to the suspension of drone takeaway services, which is far less reliable than manual delivery. Only in some special scenarios, such as the Badaling Great Wall Scenic Area in Beijing, or the cross-island distribution in Hong Kong, drones have natural advantages, and these scenarios are also the focus of Meituan drones at this stage.
Mao admitted that Meituan’s drone delivery time in the mainland is about 30% faster than that of delivery workers; If you take into account the merchant’s meals, it may only be a few minutes faster when you consider the “end-to-end” time. He said that Meituan usually chooses scenarios where drones have natural advantages to land. For example, in the cross-sea scene, drones are more than 30 minutes faster than manual delivery; However, in some areas with dense buildings, drones within 500 meters have no advantage, and Meituan will not choose to do it.
In addition to catering, in Mao Yianian’s view, the use of drones to distribute medical supplies such as drugs and testing samples is a good scenario, which has both urgent and rigid needs, and consumers are not sensitive to prices. “We hope to do it in some medical scenarios, which not only generates value for users, but also gets more freight on the business side.”
02
Compared with ground delivery, the use of drones to deliver food has led to many technical problems of “no bitterness”. For example, how to avoid the uncontrolled fall of drones is a difficulty that must be overcome.
At the opening site of Hong Kong’s first route, Meituan demonstrated the fourth-generation UAV, with a maximum flight speed of 20 meters per second, which can operate under weather conditions such as moderate rain, moderate snow, level 6 wind, low light, and temperature of -20~50 degrees Celsius; The maximum load is 2.4 kg, and the maximum distribution distance is 10 kilometers.
Meituan takeaway drone, source: Alphabet List
This drone has done a lot of safety designs. For example, Shenzhen and Hong Kong are coastal cities with many windy days, and drones must be able to resist strong wind interference. Meituan’s drone adopts a six-rotor hardware redundancy design, with a fault-tolerant power control algorithm, even if there is no mid-air collision and one blade is broken, the drone can still rely on the remaining five blades to land smoothly.
In addition, Meituan’s drone is equipped with a parachute, which took 18 months to develop and iterated 7 versions. In the event that all other protective measures fail, the drone can still land slowly with the help of a parachute without affecting third parties. In fact, this is also standard on all drones operating within the city.
How to keep drones in the planned route and avoid invading no-fly zones is also a technical difficulty.
Yang Junwei introduced that in large cities with many high-rise buildings, satellite positioning is prone to position drift, which will bring great risks to drone flights. From 2022, Meituan has introduced visual SLAM high-precision positioning and navigation to drones; In 2024, another round of updates will be made to the satellite navigation and vision architecture, and relevant papers will be published at ICRA and other international robotics summits. This system can see some small obstacles that cannot be accurately identified by the human eye, such as antennas, etc., and provide a data source for UAV obstacle avoidance.
In order to avoid the drone being maliciously controlled, Meituan also wrote the “no-fly zone” data into the flight control hardware. Once the position alarm is triggered, the drone automatically stops operating.
Similar to ground transportation systems, when multiple drones operate on the same route, there are often problems of “rushing” each other and competing for airspace resources. If it cannot be deployed efficiently, there may be a situation of “blocking the aircraft”.
In this regard, Meituan designed a virtual drone “time and space capsule”. Each “capsule” represents the airspace occupied by the drone and continues to occupy new resources and release old resources as the drone moves. In this way, Meituan can efficiently use airspace in a four-dimensional way and carry out refined management to achieve multi-aircraft coordination, route planning, air scheduling, etc.
Sometimes, drones will be “forced to stop” in the air, and you need to judge what to do next. For a long time, when similar incidents occur, Meituan will most likely need to let the “pilot” take over remotely and make judgments to see if the aircraft is safe and how to intervene.
Today, the autonomous takeover ratio of Meituan’s drone dispatch system has increased from 5% in the early days to 49%, that is, for every two “forced stop” incidents, only one requires manual intervention; The autonomous obstacle avoidance system can complete the real-time replanning of the path within 0.5 seconds, and the automatic disposal success rate reaches 98%.
“When a drone encounters danger in the air, it is likely to be able to complete the decision without anyone’s intervention, and the decision-making time is only equivalent to blinking once.” Yang Junwei said.
However, drone food delivery not only requires continuous iteration of technology and products, but also considers the cost.
A complete urban low-altitude logistics distribution network usually contains three core components: intelligent aircraft; automated sending and receiving airports; and an intelligent operation management system, which is responsible for dispatching drones in the air and take-off and landing stations on the ground. The R&D and production of all three require real money investment.
Thanks to the mature domestic UAV industry chain, the cost of UAV itself is not very high. Liang Yongfeng estimates that the price of Meituan’s drone itself may only be 20,000 to 30,000 yuan. Meituan did not announce specific prices; According to Mao Yiannian, “Our aircraft are independently developed and produced, and we have our own factory in Shenzhen Longhua.” ”
What is really expensive is the supporting take-off and landing airports. In Shenzhen, Meituan has installed huge unmanned airdrop cabinets on many routes. The drone lands on the top of the unmanned airdrop cabinet, and the takeaway automatically enters the cabinet, and the user enters the mobile phone tail number to pick up the food. Liang Yongfeng believes that the cost of this system is as high as hundreds of thousands of yuan, or even millions of yuan. Meituan’s response to this statement was untrue.
Meituan drone landing. Source: Meituan
With an estimate of 1 million yuan, Meituan currently opens 55 routes, and even if each route only sets up two airdrop cabinets, its cost is more than 100 million yuan. Compared with the cumulative delivery volume of 520,000 orders, this initial investment is very large.
Ideally, drone food delivery should be “window-to-window”: merchants place meals directly in the drone lunch box from the window, and users pick up meals at their own windows, thus saving the cost of ground equipment and personnel.
Liang Yongfeng said that some real estate developers who are interested in drone delivery have described such usage scenarios to him. “Their idea is that when designing a house in the future, a small platform for drones to take off and land outside the window will be built. Whether it is takeaway or express delivery, you only need to send a signal to the head of the household, and the head of the household extends the small platform and puts it directly on it to facilitate pick-up. ”
However, Meituan is currently struggling to do so. In fact, some routes do not have unmanned airdrop cabinets, and the service process is more “primitive”: ground fences are set up at take-off and landing points, and special personnel are assigned to pick up and deliver food.
This is not in line with Meituan’s expectations. “Drones falling on the ground are risky for pedestrians and consumers. Drones cannot fall to the ground, which is our business philosophy. Mao Nian said.
He said that the resource that Meituan drones now want to obtain most is to be able to deploy M-port automated take-off and landing airports at the entrance of buildings. “In Shenzhen, if you go out and turn left and right for 10 meters or 20 meters, you can see the M-port. The nearest M-port is only about four or five meters away from the side of the building. “We would like to have this opportunity to deploy the equipment, but it will take some time in terms of compliance approvals.” ”
This means that in the foreseeable future, the mainstream model of Meituan’s drone takeaway will still be the “drone + unmanned airdrop cabinet” model, and reducing equipment to reduce costs is not a top priority. It still has a long way to go from the ideal “window to window”.
03
How far drone takeaway can “fly”, in addition to technology, products, and operations, local policies are also one of the determining factors.
In April this year, Meituan’s fourth-generation drone passed the review of the Civil Aviation Administration and obtained the country’s first low-altitude logistics full-territory coverage operation certificate, which can start normal commercial operations nationwide.
But in fact, before Meituan drones enter a city, they still need a lot of communication and foreshadowing, and even some “opportunities”.
In May 2023, the Meituan drone team came to Hong Kong for the first time, believing that it may issue a policy within two or three years. In October last year, the Hong Kong government included the “low-altitude economy” in the “Chief Executive’s 2024 Policy Address”.
On March 20 this year, the Hong Kong government announced the low-altitude economic supervision sandbox plan, announcing 38 selected projects, and Keeta Drone was among them. At the launching ceremony of the pilot project, the Chief Executive, John Lee, issued a take-off order, and Keeta Drone completed Hong Kong’s first low-altitude real-time logistics mission. It took more than two months for Meituan’s first Hong Kong route to officially open.
Meituan does not seem to have high expectations, “In fact, the degree of openness of the low-altitude policy released at the end of last year has exceeded my expectations.” Mao said that Meituan will actively participate in the next round of policy revisions in the future.
Mao Nian said that Meituan drones started in Shenzhen, which is the most progressive and even aggressive city in the country and even the world to experiment with new policies. “If what Shenzhen has tried is proven to be effective, or reasonable, I think Hong Kong’s legislative process can be learned from and promoted. If you want to speed up, just look at Shenzhen. ”
However, compared with Shenzhen, which is at the forefront, it is difficult for other cities at home and abroad to directly copy the entire operation.
At present, in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and other cities, Meituan has only opened one or two routes, and the demonstration significance is greater than the commercial value. After all, drones whizzing past residents’ heads are never a purely commercial issue.
However, the enthusiasm of cities to develop low-altitude economies is unquestionable.
Some regions have clearly put forward the development goals of the low-altitude economy. Shandong proposed that by 2027, it will build a provincial-level comprehensive flight service station and 3 list-level low-altitude flight management service platforms, and build 35 general airports and 400 digital low-altitude aircraft take-off and landing platforms; Open more than 50 domestic drone routes and more than 20 intercity drone logistics routes, achieve normal flight of cargo drones, and achieve commercial flight of manned drones.
Dalian requires that the take-off and landing infrastructure network be improved, and by 2027, the city will lay out about 20 first-level points, about 60 second-level points, and about 200 third-level points.
Some regions also provide generous subsidies for business operations. Hefei proposed that enterprises that open UAV logistics and distribution routes will be subsidized according to the annual number of flight sorties, with each enterprise subsidizing up to 10 million yuan per year. Nanchong proposed to encourage and support postal express enterprises to participate in the construction of infrastructure such as take-off and landing points, flight bases, and drone duty hangars, and provide a one-time subsidy of 13% of the actual construction investment.
Considering in a longer time dimension, the low-altitude economy is the general trend, and enterprises and local governments are willing to participate in it. But one question to be answered is who is the “starring” of the low-altitude economy.
The current gameplay of Meituan and other companies is that from aircraft and sites to operation and maintenance and operation, the enterprise is all-inclusive in one stop. Judging from the support policies of some local governments, “the government sets up the stage and the enterprise sings” seems to be a potential option. This may conflict with the company’s plans and vision for drones.
As early as 2017, when Wang Xing proposed the “second half of the Internet”, he also announced the vision of “globalization from heaven to earth”. It was also in this year that Meituan drones began to take off. Eight years have passed, and Meituan’s drones have been ridden by the dust, but the absolute scale is not large, and the expansion speed is not fast.
In terms of technology, products, operation and maintenance, Meituan can overcome difficulties one by one; However, drone takeaway shuttles over the city, which is always closely related to municipal management and industry policies, and its growth and expansion are by no means a simple business development problem. Meituan drones have overcome many difficulties, but the many hurdles on the road ahead still require greater patience and wisdom to solve.
