Author | Liu Baodan From performance to market confidence, Meituan is walking out of a three-year low point, but Wang Xing is not stopping there - he has even bigger plans. Going overseas has become a must for Chinese companies. Meituan, which has been warming up for 8 years, has finally made up its mind to put going overseas on the agenda. Recently, Meituan began recruiting senior engineers for international silver enterprise direct connection. After the model was successful in the Hong Kong market, Meituan officially kicked off its overseas expansion, accelerated recruitment and put the first stop of the overseas expansion in Saudi Arabia in the Middle East. Going overseas is a critical turning point, which means that after more than ten years of capacity accumulation, Meituan has to export its local life capabilities to the world, which is as significant as the replication of TikTok by ByteDance. In the wave of Internet companies going overseas, Meituan went overseas later because local life patterns are more important than social, e-commerce and other industries. However, Wang Xing must make this move. Against the background of intensified domestic competition and the shrinking of community group buying, he must find a new growth story. On his entrepreneurial journey, Wang Xing is still determined to create a new business legend in this global adventure. A must-have question. Meituan has fought a beautiful takeaway battle in Hong Kong. On May 6, Measurable AI, a market research firm, released the latest data showing that by March 2024, according to the number of orders, KeeTa, the takeaway business of Meituan in Hong Kong, has a market share of 44%, rising to the largest takeaway platform in Hong Kong. However, Hong Kong is only a stopover for Meituan's overseas expansion, and Meituan has set its real meaning of going overseas in Saudi Arabia. Wall Street news learned that Meituan has been recruiting people around the direction of going overseas in the past two months. The positions include engineers, overseas human resources and operation experts, international payment and transaction product managers, mainly responsible for payments, employee management and related products in overseas markets. More importantly, the recruitment of local talents. More than a month ago, Meituan posted relevant recruitment information on LinkedIn and the Middle East recruitment platform Baye.com, with Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, as the place of work. From the city selection, Meituan did not choose the United States with a larger market space, nor did it choose Southeast Asia where culture and food are more similar, but chose Saudi Arabia. It can be seen that Meituan's overseas expansion strategy still has a heavy experimental component and is more cautious. Wang Xing is not fighting an unprepared battle. For this overseas expansion, Meituan has been planning for many years. As early as 2016, Wang Xing began to consider the issue of going overseas and visited Silicon Valley, Berlin, Israel, Jakarta and other places. In 2017, Meituan officially laid out overseas accommodation business, first connecting hotels in nearly 100 countries overseas to the Meituan application. At that time, the domestic and foreign takeaway wars were in full swing, and with Meituan's listing in Hong Kong in 2018, Wang Xing's overseas strategy was forced to be shelved. Since then, Meituan has also made a series of international investments, including Swiggy in India, Gojek in Indonesia, and Opay in Nigeria, involving food, taxis, payments and other fields, to prepare for going overseas. Along with the frequent news reports of Meituan's victory in Hong Kong, Meituan's overseas plan was finally brought to an unprecedented strategic height in 2024, and Wang Xing once again rushed to the forefront. In February, Meituan put the home business group, the in-store business group and other businesses into the core local business sector, and appointed Wang Putong as CEO, while Wang Xing personally took charge of overseas business, which ensured the landing of the overseas expansion strategy in the organizational structure. In fact, before the confirmation of the overseas expansion strategy, Wang Xing personally visited the Middle East last May and met with members of the Saudi royal family, laying the foundation for Meituan's layout in Saudi Arabia.

In today's weather is good. Today's weather is good.

As a website address, a domain name is like a street address in real life. With the acceleration of the AI era, domain names have also ushered in new development opportunities.

On August 8th, at the new conference of Aliyun Wanwang, Aliyun announced that its domain name product service has completed AI-based series transformation, launching the first AI-based large domain name model application, and launching popular domain name suffixes such as ".ai".

At the same time, Aliyun also launched the "Brand Support Plan" based on the domain name, with the highest discount of up to 28% for popular domain names, and new users can register a domain name for only 1 yuan in the first year.

Behind a series of operations, Aliyun Wanwang aims to provide more professional domain name services for global enterprises and entrepreneurs through product, model, and price upgrades, and seize new opportunities in the AI era.

In the past 30 years, domain names have continued to develop and grow with the technological changes of the Chinese Internet industry.

Domain names have roughly gone through three stages of development. The first stage is when the internet was just taking off and prominent companies like Google.com and Alibaba.com were remembered by their domain names. The second stage is the era of mobile internet, where applications such as Alipay, WeChat, TikTok, and Taobao were born. The third stage is the intelligent era including AI.

It can be said that the rise of Wanwang is a microcosm of the development of the Chinese domain name industry.

Wanwang was established in 1996, and after being acquired by Alibaba, it was merged with Aliyun in 2013. With the technical support and investment of Aliyun, it has become a leader in the industry. As of now, Aliyun Wanwang has registered more than 40 million domains and has more than 2 million users, with one out of three domains in China registered and managed through Aliyun.

Behind each round of technological iteration, there are new opportunities for the development of the Internet industry. At present, the global Internet industry has begun to enter the AI era, which will bring greater market demand for the domain name industry.

Gao Kun, the general manager of small and medium-sized enterprise applications at Aliyun, is very bullish on the future market growth of domain names. In her view, the potential of the domain name industry lies in the digital transformation entering the "fast lane", and domain names as a network entry will usher in new opportunities; the rise of Chinese-style brands will increase demand for national domain names with Chinese characteristics; small and medium-sized enterprises have entered the "era of great navigation", giving rise to demand for local national domain names, while large enterprises are pursuing the "one enterprise, one domain" approach.

What is more important is that the explosion of AI technology is expected to bring rapid growth in applications.

Liu Zixiang, the product manager of small and medium-sized enterprise applications at Aliyun, believes that domain names have two values. In the early stages of the industry, users needed to access web pages through domain names. With the development of mobile internet, the value of domain names has shifted from brand value to link value.

Liu Zixiang further emphasized, "Most apps and wearable devices need to interact with backend servers. The growth of intelligent entities will bring a large number of access services. To ensure the high availability of a large number of services, domain names are necessary. This is also the main reason why we are bullish on the future growth of domain names."

Gao Kun believes that the explosion of intelligent devices and massive applications will highlight the linking function of domain names. At the same time, the deep integration of AI technology and the industry will bring about a change in interaction methods, and intelligent entities based on large models will become standard in the domain name industry.

Wanwang's revival after many years undoubtedly bet on the future development of the domain name industry.

With the help of domain name AI applications, Aliyun Wanwang has enabled intelligent naming. Users only need to enter brand information and industry affiliation, and a large number of creative domain names can be generated based on the large domain name model. Moreover, the large model automatically performs semantic analysis, and provides usable choices through multidimensional evaluation and availability screening.

This time, Aliyun has also launched more than 40 new domain name suffixes, including ".ai", ".car", and ".me". The number of registered domain name suffixes that can be traded has exceeded 20 million worldwide.

Aliyun has newly integrated and upgraded domain name-related product systems, from domain name registration, website construction, ICP filing, DNS resolution services to domain name value evaluation.

For example, relying on 19 global DNS cluster nodes, Aliyun can provide users with the ability to access nearby and lowest-latency resolution, with a maximum of 100 million DNS queries per second. Website security is also guaranteed, and users can enjoy DDoS protection capabilities similar to global businesses such as Tmall, Taobao, and Ant Financial on the cloud.

Zhang Liang, deputy general manager of Aliyun's small and medium-sized enterprise division, said at the conference, "Wanwang's revival is Aliyun's latest practice in the domain name field based on the 'cloud computing + AI' technology. Aliyun will continue to use new technological iterations to upgrade domain name services and help Chinese enterprises establish their brand reputation in the global market."

Alibaba Cloud's global adventure has added another heavyweight weapon.