Chinese on-demand giants Meituan, JD.com invest in automation as delivery volumes surge
- Meituan processed 15.3 million food delivery orders per day in the first six months of last year
As more Chinese consumers embrace the concept of on-demand delivery – for everything from their morning coffee to furniture for a new flat – the companies handling the logistics of that are investing heavily in automation to cut costs and speed up delivery.
JD.com, China’s No 2 online shopping platform, and Meituan Dianping, an on-demand services giant, both made their debut at CES in Las Vegas this week, showcasing their latest development efforts in autonomous delivery vehicles.
At its CES booth, Meituan showed two autonomous delivery bots, one for a range of 1 kilometre and another for a 3 kilometre range, for inside office compounds, university campuses and industrial estates, as well as a third bot that handles deliveries that require it to enter a building lift.
In China, where it processed about 15.3 million food delivery orders on a daily basis in the first six months of last year, the company has been conducting trials of automated services within the 1 kilometre boundary.
“The vehicles haven’t reached the stage of mass production yet,” said Xia Huaxia, Meituan’s chief scientist, adding that the unit with the 3 kilometre range will be ready for commercial scale deployment by the end of the year.
