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Why did Alibaba ask Autonavi to
On September 10th, Alibaba celebrated its 26th anniversary. On this day, Autonavi Maps, a subsidiary of Alibaba, announced the launch of the world's first list based on user behavior, "Autonavi Street Scan List".
This move is interpreted as another significant move by Alibaba to enter the local life service market following Taobao Flash Purchase.
The efforts to boost in-store consumption are traceable
China News Service and Jwnews learned that before Alibaba's business adjustment was made public on the 10th, the confidentiality was quite high. Many media outlets mentioned keywords such as "in-store", "restarting Koubei", and "group buying" in related reports. On the 9th, China News Service and Jwnews learned from informed sources that this major business release is related to "Autonavi's in-store business", rather than "restarting Koubei".
Before the press conference on the 10th, the "Autonavi Street Sweeping List" was launched on the home page of the Autonavi App.
A screenshot of the Autonavi Map App
Gaode introduced that when users open the "Street Sweeping List", they will see rankings corresponding to different types of behaviors, including the "Tire Wear List" that shows long-distance special trips, the "Repeat Customer List" that shows multiple visits, as well as various rankings such as local favorites, city characteristic experiences, and high-scoring fireworks stores. Each category will be updated daily based on dynamic data.
In fact, Alibaba's official announcement of its focus on in-store consumption business was already traceable.
On the evening of August 29th, during Alibaba's first-quarter 2026 fiscal year analyst conference call, Jiang Fan, CEO of Alibaba's E-commerce Business Group, stated that the Taobao Flash Purchase business has reached a certain scale, with approximately 150 million active users every day. Among these users, some have the need for in-store pickup or in-store group buying. Therefore, Alibaba will start from the perspective of meeting users' demands, especially considering the synergy with offline home delivery services, to provide users with more diverse services. He disclosed that currently, Alibaba is also conducting tests and explorations of in-store business in some cities.
In-store business is not a new business for Alibaba. In fact, since Alibaba invested in Koubei in 2006, it has never given up on this business.
Public information shows that in 2008, Alibaba fully acquired Koubei.com. In 2009, Alibaba upgraded its "Greater Taobao" strategy, and Koubei.com was merged into Taobao.
In the following years, Koubei.com was regarded by the outside world as having an unclear positioning problem. It was not until June 2015 that Alibaba and Ant Financial, which was then the company, jointly announced the relaunch of the "Koubei.com" brand. Since then, Koubei has been deeply involved in Alipay's "Double 12" event, and this operational development model has continued until 2018.
On April 2, 2018, Alibaba fully acquired Ele.me. In October of the same year, Alibaba announced the official establishment of a local life service company, which was formed by the merger of the two major businesses of Ele.me and Koubei.
However, in the home delivery (food delivery) and in-store consumption markets, the merger of Alibaba's two local businesses has not achieved satisfactory results. As a result, Autonavi has taken on some of Alibaba's imagination in the local life market.
Rolling back the clock to 2013, at that time, Alibaba invested in Autonavi and obtained a 28% stake. Immediately following 2014, Alibaba completed the full acquisition of Autonavi for 1.1 billion US dollars. After the acquisition was completed, Autonavi delisted from Nasdaq and gradually integrated into Alibaba's ecosystem. At that time, the acquisition of Autonavi was also regarded as a key move for Alibaba to lay out the mobile Internet and O2O markets.
In the past two years, Autonavi has begun to take on more local life services for Alibaba.
According to multiple media reports, on March 22, 2023, Autonavi held an internal meeting and announced the official merger with Ele.me's in-store business (formerly Koubei) under Alibaba's local life services division. In the future, all the local life in-store businesses under Alibaba will be uniformly integrated into Autonavi. Alibaba's financial report for the first quarter and the full year of 2023 disclosed that in June 2022, the average daily active users of Autonavi exceeded 120 million.
Regarding this integration work, Yu Yongfu, then CEO of Alibaba Local Life Services Company and chairman of Autonavi Group, stated at a live-streamed meeting on the same day that organizational adjustments are merely a means, and the ultimate goal is business development. Everyone should work together to do a good job in the in-store business. In the coming quarter, the teams of Autonavi and Koubei will explore together how to integrate.
In terms of the local life business, Alibaba has repeatedly mentioned the overall performance of its in-store business in its financial reports. As mentioned in the third-quarter financial report of fiscal year 2024, the revenue of the local life group increased by 13% year-on-year, and the overall orders increased by more than 20% year-on-year. The first-quarter financial report of fiscal year 2025 mentioned that the orders of Autonavi and Ele.me have increased, operational efficiency has improved, and business scale has expanded...
Nowadays, Autonavi has laid a certain foundation for undertaking in-store business.
Alibaba's third-quarter financial report for fiscal year 2025 released at the beginning of this year shows that Autonavi Map has made a significant breakthrough and achieved its first profit.
On September 10th, Autonavi disclosed for the first time that Autonavi Maps covers over 7 million restaurant locations across the country. Currently, there are 120 million searches related to life services every day, and it navigates to 13 million life service destinations.
On August 29th, Alibaba released its first-quarter financial report for the fiscal year 2026, which mentioned that for the three months ending June 30, 2025, the revenue of its "instant retail" business was 14.784 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 12%, mainly due to the growth in order volume brought about by the launch of "Taobao Flash Purchase" at the end of April 2025.
What impact does it have on consumers?
In the competition of local life in-store business, Meituan, as the defending champion, has a leading market share advantage.
On August 27th, Meituan released its financial report, showing that in the second quarter of this year, it achieved a revenue of 91.8 billion yuan, representing a year-on-year growth of 11.7%. Among them, the in-store business also continued to grow in this quarter, with the order volume increasing by more than 40% year-on-year and the number of annual active merchants reaching a new high.
It is worth noting that on the very day the "Gaode Street Sweeping List" was released, Meituan officially announced that Dianping would "restart" quality food delivery. In Meituan's introduction, it is also mentioned that "large model empowerment" - it will use its self-developed large model for the B-end, combined with a vast amount of real evaluation data to analyze user needs, further eliminate non-real review data, and provide reliable decision-making for users with "AI+ real high scores".
What market impact will Alibaba's current push into in-store consumption business bring?
Zhang Yi, CEO and chief analyst of iiMedia Research, told China News Service and Jwnews that there are multiple factors contributing to Alibaba's current push into in-store business. On the one hand, the scale of China's local life consumption market is continuously expanding, while pure online business has actually reached a bottleneck period. Coupled with Meituan's "far ahead" in the local life service market and Douyin's share of the pie, Alibaba's move is not only to compete for market share but also to better develop its online moat. On the other hand, Autonavi has the advantages of high-frequency traffic and platform, which can activate the in-store business and have a good expectation and synergy effect.
Ma Jihua, founder of Beijing Darui Management Consulting Co., Ltd. and a senior analyst in the Internet industry, told China News Service and Jwnews that Alibaba's deeper exploration of local life will help create a multi-level consumption ecosystem at all times, from multi-day delivery to same-day delivery within minutes, forming a complete business closed loop. Looking directly, in-store business can drive traffic for the entire e-commerce industry. In the long term, it can improve the big data view of user consumption and provide a continuous stream of resource impetus for the future era of artificial intelligence.
What advantages does Alibaba have in the face of market defenders? Zhang Yi believes that Alibaba's strength lies in its relatively comprehensive ecosystem, including payment, e-commerce, maps and other integrated systems, which can provide rich traffic entry points and user data for in-store business. For Alibaba, the future operational direction of its in-store business is of great significance.
Ma Jihua also believes that, in addition to its outstanding ecological synergy, Alibaba leads in AI and cloud computing technologies and has a solid foundation and rich experience in exploring the B-end market. Of course, in terms of the in-depth operation of offline merchants, Alibaba is not as good as Meituan. The Dianping App has already occupied users' minds, and it's not easy to change.
A previous report released by iiMedia Research predicted that the market size of online food delivery services would reach 1,746.9 billion yuan in 2025, and the scale of local life services would exceed 2.5 trillion yuan in 2025. However, no matter how these Internet giants adjust their businesses, for consumers, getting benefits and convenience is what they care about most.
Ma Jihua believes that Alibaba's move has given consumers more choices, and competition will enhance the service experience. Users can even take advantage of subsidies. Furthermore, this kind of competition will also accelerate technological innovation and present an opportunity for the industry to make innovative breakthroughs.
As for the subsidies that consumers are concerned about, Ma Jihua said, "Subsidies are inevitable, but they will definitely be more precise and not be a flood of money."
Zhang Yi also indicated that there would definitely be high subsidies or related disguised activities. Alibaba can leverage its technological advantages to provide consumers with a more convenient consumption experience.
On the day the "Gaode Street Sweeping List" was released, Gaode announced the launch of the "Fireworks Good Store Support Plan", offering generous subsidies in three aspects to encourage users to consume in stores.
In terms of travel subsidies, Autonavi Maps has issued a 200 million yuan exclusive in-store travel subsidy voucher package for users whose departure or destination is an offline merchant. The package includes subsidies for buses and subways, taxi coupons, fuel coupons, etc., to cover users' travel costs.
In terms of transaction subsidies, Autonavi Map will issue 950 million yuan worth of consumption vouchers to encourage users to visit the Fireworks Good Store to experience high-quality services, including in-store coupons and discounts on signature dishes. All costs will be borne by the platform.
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