Tencent, Alibaba now dominate online food delivery space in China

Last month, Baidu sold its O2O food delivery service, Baidu Waimai, to Ele.me. This means that now, the Alibaba-backed Ele.me and Tencent-backed Meituan dominate the space.

This deal speaks volumes about the state of Chinese internet in 2017. Here are the three big trends:

Convergence is continuing

China’s internet giants- Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu- are continuing to move into each others’ spaces. This is a big change from a few years ago when Tencent mostly stayed in gaming and messaging, Alibaba in e-commerce, and Baidu in search.

As Alibaba and Tencent now dwarf Baidu in market cap, the latter’s exit from food delivery implies that it’s tired of being caught between much larger competitors.

China-specific solutions weigh more

The Chinese O2O food delivery trend created an army of delivery people on scooters. They race around streets, alleys, parks, and sidewalks and congregate outside storefronts and subways.

What all of these have in common is that they all offer China-specific solutions.

The Chinese market is so big that creative solutions in small niches can mean big businesses.
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Tech Mahindra to focus on improving profitability even at cost of growth

Latest News - India’s fifth largest IT services and solutions firm, Tech Mahindra, stated that the focus of the firm would be to improve profitability even at the cost of growth going ahead.

"It is not fair for the company to have margins in 12-15 per cent range when my competitors are reporting margins in the range of 20 per cent and above. We will strive to do better both on Ebitda (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation) and growth, but my priority is going to be Ebitda now," said C P Gurnani, CEO & MD, Tech Mahindra.

He further added that as part of improving the margins, the company would let go of businesses or deals that did not have high yields. "We will definitely look at the yield management. Some of this will also mean abandoning my field engineering kind of work in LCC. I will reduce my business there. If you see de-growth, it is because I have decided on those particular areas," said Gurnani.

The company, which recently announced its third quarter numbers, reported topline growth of 12.7 per cent at (Read More)