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At a press conference with Shanghai officials, Meituan Vice President Mao Fang said that the company would introduce “urgent deliveries,” or next-day group deliveries, community bulk buying for meals and groceries, and autonomous delivery vehicles.
As of Thursday, the city had reported more than 130,000 cases since its latest wave began in March.
Meituan’s service aims to ease those challenges — allowing users living in the same community to place orders together and receive them the next day, said Mao.
Priority is given to neighborhoods with “closed residential compounds and greater distribution pressure,” she added.
“The difficulty of buying vegetables reflected by the public is mainly due to the lack of sorting and distribution capacity,” the executive said at the media briefing. “To this end, Meituan has called nearly a thousand skilled sorting personnel from around the country to help.”
As of Thursday, Meituan said it had delivered more than 200,000 orders through its emergency program, and planned to extend the service to other areas.
The company has also deployed a fleet of self-driving vans in Pudong, located in the eastern half of the city, to help dispatch daily supplies.
Widespread disruption
Businesses have been forced to adjust.
Shanghai’s lockdown was initially slated to last just a few days for each half of the city.
But this week, authorities said that restrictions would continue until further notice, as the government needed to “test more, review results, transfer positive cases and analyze the overall Covid situation.”
Despite the new measures, its shares were down nearly 2% in Hong Kong on Friday.
“In Asia, markets are growing warier about China as the Shanghai lockdown drags on,” Jeffrey Halley, a senior market analyst for Asia Pacific at Oanda, wrote in a note to clients.
“China’s Covid-zero policy continues to be its Achilles heel although there are plenty of other reasons to be a little cautious.”
— CNN’s Yong Xiong in Seoul contributed to this report.