By CHENG Lu

E-commerce giant Alibaba is merging its restaurant review business (previously known as Koubei) into its AutoNavi map app.

Koubei, a local-lifestyle site founded in 2004, didn’t last very long. Alibaba took over the name and relaunched the brand in 2015. 

When Alibaba absorbed the food delivery company Ele.me, Koubei was marginalized and became part of the local-life business, hosting restaurant reviews. Last year, Alibaba pulled Koubei from three-quarters of the cities where it operated, but it still did not make money.

Local services are Alibaba’s battlefield with Meituan. In 2020, Alibaba unified maps (AutoNavi), food delivery (Ele.me), and travel (Fliggy) into a single business unit. 

In 2021, AutoNavi had 100 million daily active users, becoming the third Alibaba app to reach the threshold after Taobao and Alipay. It is now the second-largest ride-hailing platform in China now. 

Last year, ByteDance’s Douyin recently joined the saturated local life service business. Its GMV in the first six months of 2022 reached 22 billion yuan (US$3 billion).