The encyclopedia · Legal & Compliance · Legal decision · 2018–2021
Meituan locked merchants into exclusive deals and paid ¥3.44B for it
Since 2018 Meituan made food-delivery merchants sign exclusive deals and punished them if they strayed — China's antitrust regulator fined it ¥3.44B.
Meituan · 美团 · 2021-10-08
What happened
On 8 October 2021 China's State Administration for Market Regulation fined Meituan ¥3.442 billion — 3% of its ¥114.748 billion in 2020 domestic sales — for abusing its dominant position in the online food-delivery platform market.
The investigation, opened in April 2021, found that since 2018 Meituan had pushed merchants into exclusive cooperation agreements through differentiated rates and delayed listings, collected exclusivity deposits, and used data and algorithms to punish merchants who also worked with rival platforms — search demotion, traffic limits, deposit deductions.
Beyond the fine, the regulator ordered Meituan to stop the conduct and to refund the full ¥1.289 billion in exclusivity deposits it had collected. The case was decided under Article 17 of the Anti-Monopoly Law and followed China's record Alibaba fine by six months; together the two drew the line under platform exclusivity in China.
Why it happened
- Exclusivity enforced by algorithm makes the merchants police themselves: the platform's enforcement cost is near zero, which is what turns the practice into leverage abuse.
- Deposits turn a contract term into collateral — money held in advance makes defection expensive without a single instruction being issued.
- After a rival platform was fined for the same conduct, the legal price of continuing it became a known number; Meituan paid it six months later.
The lesson
Lock-in enforced with data and algorithms is still lock-in — exclusivity extracted from dependent business partners gets priced by antitrust regulators as abuse, however elegant the mechanism.
Sources
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