ByteDance's Douyin teams up with Alibaba's Ele.me in mini programme push
19/08/2022 11:03
BEIJING, Aug 19 (Reuters) - ByteDance's Douyin and
Alibaba-owned 9988.HK Ele.me said on Friday they have agreed
on a collaboration that will see the food delivery app establish
a presence on Douyin, as the Chinese short video app builds its
ecosystem.
Ele.me would be one of the biggest players to date that
Douyin, the Chinese equivalent of TikTok, has brought into its
mini-programme platform that it launched some two years ago.
"Douyin's open platform is an important bridge that Douyin
uses to connect users with business partners," Douyin chief
executive Kelly Zhang Nan said in a joint statement.
Chinese "super-apps", including Tencent Holding's 0700.HK
WeChat and Ant Group's Alipay, have made forays into the
mini-programme field as they aim to create their own ecosystems
to keep users engaged.
WeChat, China's ubiquitous messaging app, said its average
daily active users for mini programmes hit 450 million in 2021.
In general, mini programmes look and operate much like apps on
Apple Inc's AAPL.O iOS and Google's GOOGL.O Android
operating systems but they are less data intensive.
Douyin counts more than 600 million daily active users.
A person familiar with the matter said that Douyin's mini
programmes were different to those of other players as they were
mainly powered by the app's recommendation algorithm, meaning
that users would be recommended services based on their use of
the app.
Ele.me is China's second largest food delivery platform
after Meituan 3690.HK .
Douyin last year started allowing its users to place takeout
orders directly via livestreams. The deliveries are handled by
restaurants or delivery riders hired by another service.
Douyin does not employ delivery riders.
(Reporting by Yingzhi Yang and Brenda Goh; Editing by Robert
Birsel)
((Yingzhi.Yang@thomsonreuters.com; +861056692133;))