In Ep. 26 of TechBuzz China, co-hosts Ying-Ying Lu and Rui Ma discuss Koubei, rounding up the second installment of a two-part deep-dive into the local services space in China. An Alibaba subsidiary, Koubei recently merged with ele.me, another Alibaba-owned (via acquisition) entity which was covered in Ep. 25 last week.
In Ep. 25 of TechBuzz China, co-hosts Ying-Ying Lu and Rui Ma talk about Alibaba’s recent moves to firm up its strategy around local services, putting pressure on Meituan-Dianping to defend itself.
Alibaba Group announced today to merge the online food delivery service platform Ele.me and its local commerce platform Koubei into a new local life service company.
On October 16, Ele.me announced it would run food-delivery service on Alipay and Koubei, preceded by its consolidation of Baidu’s food delivery unit—Baidu Takeout. Meanwhile, food delivering is changed into “Ele.me Takeout” on the front-page of Alipay’s app, making Ele.me one of the 11 original applications on Alipay home page interface. A while ago, Takeout…