China Resources fund unit backs Meituan-Dianping

As part of the agreement, the two parties will work on new projects that combine Meituan-Dianping's food ordering platform and China Resources' offline retail business. A number of China Resources' supermarket and convenience store brands, including Vanguard, Tesco, OLE and Vango, will be integrated into Meituan-Dianping's online platform.

Founded in 2003, Dianping established itself as a provider of restaurant reviews and group-buying services, making money through a combination of paid listings and discount offers. Meituan was set up in 2010 as a group-buying site. The two companies have to various degrees pushed into other segments of local services, such as hotel reservations, movie ticket booking and food delivery.

In October of last year, Dianping and Meituan - both of which have received substantial private equity and strategic funding - agreed to merge. In January, the combined platform raised a $3.3 billion round from investors including Tencent Holdings, DST Global and Temasek Holdings. The round valued the company at $15 billion.

Meituan-Dianping currently has over 600 million users and 432 Chinese merchants on its platform. Last month, the company received more than 11.5 million orders for different types of services.

CRE Alliance launched its debut fund - CRE Alliance Fund I - earlier this year, with a target to raise $1 billion. The vehicle, which focuses on overseas consumer and retail assets, reached a first close of $250 million few weeks ago. China Resources and Great Wall Pan Asia International Investment are among the investors in the fund.

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• Topics
• Greater China
• Technology
• Expansion
• Consumer
• China
• TMT
• Growth capital