Alibaba, Grab, Tencent, Meituan Gear Up For Growth As China Bets On Services To Revive Economy

China’s Minister of Commerce on Tuesday stated at the Third Session of the 14th National People’s Congress that consumption remains the primary driver of economic growth. Service consumption has maintained positive momentum, emerging as a new growth engine in overall consumption.

Benchmark analyst Fawne Jiang noted that in 2024, the biggest highlight in consumption was the “trade-in” policy, which has generated new momentum, driving industrial upgrades and transformation.

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Jiang added that in 2025, the trade-in program will be expanded and upgraded, with broader subsidy coverage for more product categories. Actions will be taken to enhance the quality of service consumption, with a series of initiatives organized to promote service consumption.

The Minister of Commerce stated that the main issue with commodity consumption lies in softer consumer purchasing power and willingness, making it the primary challenge on the demand side. In contrast, the main challenge for service consumption is on the supply side, with an insufficient supply of high-quality services.

Meituan MPNGY CEO Wang Xing recently hosted an internal meeting with senior executives, highlighting a focus on food & grocery retail, international expansion, and technology for the next decade, Jiang noted.  

Alibaba Group Holding’s BABA Hema is reported to be continuing to expand Freshippo Stores, with a key focus on the Fresh offering, the analyst stated. It plans to open about 100 new stores and expand into dozens of new cities.

Alibaba’s Ele.me is said to be investing more than 1 billion yuan (about $140 million) to support merchants by offering discounted commission rates, special subsidies, exclusive traffic, digital operation services, hardware facilities, and AI technology capabilities.

Grab Holdings GRAB is reportedly acquiring the supermarket chain Everrise in Malaysia to expand its grocery business further in one of its key markets. Grab plans to digitize Everrise’s operations and introduce on-demand grocery delivery services for its customers, Jiang said.

Alibaba has released an open-sourced new inference model, QwQ-32B. Leveraging large-scale reinforcement learning, QwQ-32B has achieved a breakthrough in mathematics, coding, and general capabilities, with overall performance comparable to DeepSeek-R1. Additionally, QwQ-32B significantly reduced deployment costs and can be locally deployed on consumer-grade GPUs.

Tencent Holding’s TCEHY Hunyuan has launched an image-to-video model and made it open-source for the public. Businesses and developers can apply for API access through Tencent Cloud.

Alibaba Cloud aims to encourage the adoption of generative AI foundational models among Japanese enterprises, offering tailored adjustments and customizations based on client needs, the analyst noted. The company plans to increase the number of Japanese projects utilizing Alibaba’s models to over 1,000 within three years.

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