Techbuzz China By Pandaily

In episode 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. This war of “O2O,” or online-to-offline, is shaping up to be intense, with the latest battle round seeing the merger between food delivery rival ele.me (which Alibaba acquired for $9.5 billion in April) and Alibaba’s new retail subsidiary, Koubei.  This episode of TechBuzz is the first in a series of deep dives into the local services space in China. Rui and Ying-Ying begin with some background on Meituan’s “unstoppable roll” on its way to becoming the “Amazon of services” for China: the gargantuan super app is currently dominating several verticals including food delivery, movie ticket sales, bike sharing, and travel. However, its dominance is being challenged by Alibaba, and in the food delivery space this shows up in the form of the ecommerce giant’s support for and acquisition of ele.me. Rui and Ying-Ying t