Sources: Meituan plans to lay off 10%-20% of staff from its core business units, days after announcing that it added 17K jobs from July 2021 to mid-March 2022
Coco Feng / South China Morning Post :
Context & Ripple Effects
Meituan's headcount message has flipped within days: after publicizing that it added 17,000 jobs from July 2021 to mid-March 2022, sources now report plans to cut 10%-20% of staff in its core business units. The cut follows a broader retrenchment wave across Chinese tech — ByteDance, Kuaishou, and iQiyi were already laying off more staff than usual in late 2021 amid regulatory pressure and competition.
The move also echoes an established playbook in Chinese ride-hailing and delivery: Didi cut roughly 15% of its workforce in 2019, concentrating on core ride-hailing while shedding non-essential units. Meituan applying the same logic to its own core units signals the cost discipline phase has reached even the businesses these platforms were built around.
First-order effects
- Employees across Meituan's core business units face 10%-20% cuts, and the timing — days after a 17,000-job announcement — puts the company's employer brand and internal trust under immediate strain.
Second-order effects
- Rivals read the same signal Meituan does: with delivery economics tightening, the contest shifts from headcount growth to unit-cost efficiency, pressuring competitors like ByteDance's expanding delivery effort to match the discipline rather than out-hire it.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Chinese platform giants normalize recurring core-unit pruning — a cycle that by 2026 shows Meituan, Baidu, and Xiaomi still trimming workforces, feeding worker fears that automation and AI are replacing the roles cuts open up.
The trend: Chinese consumer-internet platforms are cycling from aggressive hiring to core-focused retrenchment as regulatory pressure and competition compress margins, with workforce cuts becoming a recurring tool rather than a one-off correction.