"Liquor and Travel" Becomes New Growth Point Amid Giant Competition, Lifestyle Services Are the Front-End Link of Supply Chain Layout

QuestMobile data shows that the scale of monthly active users on China's mobile internet continues to maintain low single-digit growth rates. As of June 2025, the number of monthly active users across the entire network reached 1.267 billion. Additionally, traffic continues to concentrate towards leading internet enterprises. With internet红利 (dividends/peak growth) reaching its ceiling, major tech companies are seeking ways to find new performance growth points.

When discussing industry involution (内卷 - intense, often internal competition), Richard Liu (Liu Qiangdong) explicitly stated his support for the national policy against involution. "There are two types of involution: one involves racing to the bottom, engaging in low-end competition that leaves practitioners across the entire industrial chain without good income or treatment. Another type of involution is competing over who has fairer prices and safer products—this is moving upwards," Liu stated. "We should support moving upwards, not downwards. Because the latter makes it impossible for everyone in the industry to earn money, leading to numerous problems."

Currently, JD.com's liquor and travel business has completed its initial layout, but the market competition landscape remains relatively stable. The domestic liquor and travel market has formed a relatively mature competitive landscape, with platforms like Ctrip and Meituan holding major market shares and possessing first-mover advantages in terms of user scale, brand recognition, and resource accumulation.

Meituan, leveraging the traffic from its high-frequency food delivery service through "traffic advantage + low-price strategy," occupies a significant share in the mid-to-low-end liquor and travel market. Meituan's full-year 2024 financial report shows that the revenue of its Core Local Commerce segment (including in-store, hotel, and travel businesses) reached RMB 250.2 billion, a year-on-year increase of 21%. Furthermore, platforms like Fliggy (Feizhu) and Douyin are also continuously attempting to break into the liquor and travel market.

From an industry background perspective, the proportion of lifestyle service consumption in total consumption continues to rise. The "2024 China Lifestyle Service Industry Development Report" shows that in 2024, the number of business outlets in China's lifestyle service industry reached 12.893 million, with approximately 115 million employees; the industry's operating revenue in the first three quarters was RMB 7.2 trillion, a year-on-year increase of 6.0%. These data indicate that the lifestyle service industry not only has a large and flexible capacity for absorbing employment but also plays an irreplaceable role in activating effective demand and driving consumption upgrades.