Report: Baidu to sell food delivery service

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Alibaba-backed food delivery app Eleme may announce to acquire Baidu’s counterpart service as soon as this week, indicating the competition in the online to offline (O2O) service to enter the final stage, yicai.com reported on Monday.

After being acquired, Baidu Food Delivery will still operate under the current brand for about one year, the report said, citing an anonymous Baidu insider who is close to the deal.

Although both Baidu and Eleme declined to comment when contacted by CGTN on Monday, there have been media reports about the possible deal since last year.

Baidu Food Delivery has once been an important part of its O2O service the company once attached great importance to when it claimed two years ago to invest as much as 20 billion yuan to develop its group purchase service Nuomi.

However, burning cash in O2O has not made much breakthrough and the Internet titan has redefined itself as an AI company since late last year, voicing less for O2O sector.

China’s Internet-based food delivery market saw a total transaction volume of 45.95 billion yuan in the second quarter of this year with Eleme on the top of monthly active users followed by Meituan and Baidu, data from Internet consultancy Analysys showed.

In addition to a leading position in active users, Eleme is backed by Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba and its financial arm Ant Financial with at least 1 billion US dollars investment just finished in May, according to Bloomberg.