Delivery workers pick up orders at a beverage shop in Shanghai on July 13, 2025. Photo: VCG

Leading Chinese food delivery platforms Meituan, Eleme, and JD.com all posted statements on Friday, vowing to curb disorderly competition and cease the price-based rivalry amid warnings from government departments and industry participants.

Almost simultaneously, all three platforms issued statements on Friday morning, pledging to regulate promotional behaviors, curb unfair competition and promote a fair and orderly industry order with the aim of fostering a win-win ecosystem.

Meituan pledged that it will strictly comply to relevant laws and regulations including anti-monopoly law, e-commerce, anti-unfair competition and pricing laws, and not to sell goods and services at prices significantly below costs.

Taobao and Eleme, under Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, said in an online post that they will resolutely resist vicious competition and cooperate to promote a win-win ecosystem and work in four aspects including rationally planning and distributing discounts and ensuring the rights of the vendors.

JD.com pledged that its food delivery business will continue to resist involution, and refrain from vicious subsidies such as "zero-yuan shopping." The company said it resolutely resisted making frothiness by creating an order boom.

In July, the State Administration for Market Regulation, the country's top market regulator, summoned Alibaba Group Holding's Eleme, Meituan and JD.com to urge them to engage in rational competition following months of fierce competition, during which the platforms offered a barrage of food delivery discounts to win over users.

The meeting aimed to "further regulate promotion behaviors, encourage rational competition, and foster a healthy ecosystem and win-win situation for consumers, merchants, delivery riders, and platform operators," the regulator said in an announcement.

While the promotional activities sparked a consumption frenzy, some analysts have pointed out a promotion war can hardly be sustained for long and will add strains to the supply chain.

Commenting on the issue of regulating enterprises' disorderly price competition in accordance with laws and regulations, an NDRC official said on Friday that the top economic planner is accelerating the revision work of the pricing law, with the draft revision further clarifying the identification process of unfair pricing behavior such as low-price dumping.

"Unchecked competition not only harms consumers' legitimate rights and interests but also hinders the development of businesses, causing the entire industry to fall into inefficient and even detrimental 'involution-style' competition," the official said, adding that the NDRC plans to identify industries where the involution problem is more conspicuous to carry out targeted cost surveys, understand the production and operation situation, and urge enterprises to consciously regulate their pricing behavior.

Global Times