Meican (the “Company”), a leading Chinese SaaS-based group catering technology company, announced today that it has completed E-round financing of US$100 million invested by Centurium Capital, a leading private equity investment management firm in China. The financing is expected to enhance Meican’s capabilities and investments in product research and development, global customer acquisition, supply chain diversification, and human resources development.
Founded in 2011, Meican is China’s largest group catering solutions provider. The Company offers comprehensive catering solutions to corporate clients and their employees, including both on-premise and off-premise catering and SaaS solutions. It also offers SaaS solutions to traditional group dining players, including digital ordering, integrated payment processing, catering operation, corporate fee control, as well as reporting & analytics.
The Company’s clients include Bytedance, Alibaba, SF Express, China CITIC Bank, Pacific Insurance, SASAC, Peking University People’s Hospital and China Southwest Aviation University, and numerous others. Through its SaaS technology and innovative solutions, Meican has transformed and modernized the traditional group catering industry.
Statistics show that the group catering market in China exceeded RMB1.5 trillion in 2020, serving 670 million customers while growing at over 15 percent annually. However, the Chinese group catering industry is still very fragmented, with a CR10 (market share of top 10 players) of less than five percent in China, which is in sharp contrast with a CR10 of 60 to 80 percent in developed markets such as the United States, Europe, Japan and South Korea. This demonstrates huge growth and consolidation potential.
Xiao Zhao, Co-founder and CEO of Meican, commented, “Thanks to increasing penetration of digitalization and demand for a better group catering experience, the industry is going through a profound transformation. We will continue to invest in the diversification and digitalization of our supply chain to further upgrade the overall industry infrastructure and solidify our market-leading position. With synergies from our core advantages in SaaS solutions and unique product offering, we are confident that Meican will accelerate its growth and expansion to further tap into the trillion-yuan group catering market.”
Gary Liu, Managing Director of Centurium Capital, commented, “Serving two huge markets of business services and catering, Meican has built a very unique business model and developed innovative solutions through years of hard work. We believe there is still a huge unmet demand from corporate clients and their employees for modern, standardized and diversified group catering services. Meican has grown significantly over the past several years, connected a large number of traditional catering service providers, and accumulated deep industry expertise. We are pleased to partner with Meican to support the Company’s expansion and help them to continue to upgrade their product and service offerings.”
Today, Meican’s products and services cover nearly 100 cities across China, including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chengdu, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Suzhou, Wuhan, and serve thousands of corporate customers and merchant partners.
Centurium Capital is a leading private equity investment firm in China and primarily focuses on investing in China’s consumer, business services and healthcare sectors. As a transformational capital provider with a focus on business model innovation and resolving structural deficiencies to unlock growth potential, Centurium pursues a hands-on and operations-centric investment approach to drive value creation and generate long term shareholder value.
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