As Meituan (美团) entered the 618 Shopping Festival this year, the battle with JD.com has intensified from food delivery to “instant retail”. More recently, JD.com has taken the rivalry a step further by expanding the battlefront to offline supermarkets.
While Meituan started bringing its Xiaoxiang Supermarket (小象超市) offline with new openings, JD.com has also announced its plan to significantly expand its Seven Fresh (七鲜) supermarket brand. Sources close to JD.com reported that Seven Fresh is in the process of opening 18 branches (including shops and warehouses) in Beijing and nearby Tianjin.
In fact, in its Q1 2025 financial report, JD.com already laid out its intention to expedite its “1+N” model in Northern China, meaning one large supermarket combined with many warehouses for “instant deliveries”. It plans to cover the entirety of the Beijing and Tianjin regions. Similar to Xiaoxiang and Freshippo from Alibaba, the delivery warehouses/depots will help cover entire regions in a 30-minute delivery range.
With JD.com doubling down on “local life” services and omnichannel retail, many see the retailer starting to look increasingly like Meituan. While retaining its edge in consumer electronics within e-commerce, its food delivery has seen huge growth since its launch, with daily orders surpassing 25 million and more than 1.5 million participating merchants. With local life services from ticketing to hotel bookings, even chemists and repair services, JD.com is reshaping itself as a “local life” service platform. But with competition from Xiaoxiang, Freshippo and to an extent, Sam’s Club from Walmart, JD.com is entering a more or less saturated market as a disruptor.