Reports from ridesharing media indicated that Keeta, the international food delivery platform owned and managed by China’s Meituan, has achieved favorable unit economics, particularly in Saudi Arabia last July, but around 22 months after penetrating its market, or roughly around two years.
The company has implemented its experience from its operations in China in logistics and merchant digitization, while higher average order values and established delivery habits have supported its expansion.
Is this a good sign, or it took so long before the profits turned out? Let’s take a look.
This news was first broken by Dan Hu on LinkedIn, who specializes in AI, cloud, and data-center infrastructure.
He wrote, “In China, Meituan is the app people open several times a day without noticing – food delivery, restaurant bookings, groceries, anything local. By order volume, it’s one of the largest platform businesses in the world. For most of its life, it operated in a single country. That changed in 2023, when it started going abroad as Keeta: Hong Kong first, then Saudi Arabia, with Brazil named as the next market. On the August 28 earnings call, Meituan gave the first real scorecard. Keeta entered Saudi Arabia in September 2024 and turned profitable this July, 22 months. Hong Kong, its first market outside the mainland, had taken 29 months to get there.”
So, with those statements, you get the bigger image. The CEO, Wang Xing, also shared their sentiments on this matter.
Wang Xing stated that this shows their operational approach can scale well across different overseas markets.
In other words, people are seeing this as a good sign. Oh.
Comparing to Keeta’s performance in Hong Kong, it took 29 months for this destination to reach the same milestone from its launch there in May 2023.
However, Wang buckled down, saying that Saudi Arabia was even a larger market, so this is really an achievement, considering it entered there only in September 2024.
Another factor that led to this is consumer preference, as well as lower prices, and reliable deliveries. Meanwhile, on the part of restaurants, their wishes for volume, reasonable commissions, and dependable fulfillment were granted, hence this profit, so the stars aligned.
Specialists might also want to take a look at the investments that Meituan’s partnership with Saudi Arabia poured in, which went all the way up to $267 million, plus an aggressively-priced consumer proposition.
And, months after the launch, Keeta stated over 90 percent of the restaurants on its system were available with free deliveries, while launch promotions included a 50 percent discount on initial orders, with newer customers receiving various timeless perks, such as sign-up vouchers.
Here are the last terms from Hu, “Winning changes what you are. Until then: Keeta’s ability to break into a market clearly travels, and Saudi Arabia went faster than Hong Kong. That’s the cheap half, done well. Brazil is worth talking about once both markets have answered the expensive one. Not before.”
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