Meituan comments on entering the 100 billion medical beauty market： saying it will strictly review qualifications and adopt a conservative strategy

Hyaluronic acid, botulinum toxin, water light needles, hair removal, skin management… Meituan Review (03690.HK) is entering the growing medical aesthetic market.

On January 22, at the Meituan Dianping Medical Beauty Industry Summit held in Shanghai, Li Xiaohui, head of Meituan Dianping Medical Beauty Medical Business Department, said in an interview with surging news reporters that there are many user pain points in the medical beauty industry, such as opaque information and opaque decision-making, so an Internet-based platform is needed to help users make better decisions and ensure the safety of medical beauty consumption. "Meituan Dianping is a word-of-mouth platform in everyone’s mind, and medical beauty itself needs users to comment on good and bad."

Meituan Dianping has been incubating the medical beauty business since August 2017. After more than a year of operation, the medical beauty business has become an independent business department from a sub-category under the original Beauty Business Department. It is reported that Meituan Medical Beauty Channel has achieved a 6-fold rapid growth in users and a 5-fold increase in the number of products in the past year. As of September 2018, it has covered 47 cities across the country and more than 1,600 cooperative merchants.

40% are young users under the age of 25, and 20% are male

Open the "Medical Beauty" channel of Meituan or Dianping App, and 400 medical beauty items are divided into 18 categories. Just one "facial filling" can find 10 small items such as rhinoplasty, forehead filling, chin padding, apple muscle filling, and aegyo saliva.

Here, you can quickly find the effect you want through the three dimensions of hospital, doctor or product. In some star brand beauty hospitals, there are already thousands of user experience reports as a reference. Many products provided by beauty hospitals have been simultaneously launched on the Meituan medical beauty platform. Consumers can pay in advance directly on the Meituan platform, and then pay the balance after arriving at the store.

Pull down the page, you can see a user diary, with pictures and texts recording the comparison photos before and after the experience. In addition, in the "Institute of Medical Aesthetics", you can see that nearly 30,000 users are sharing their medical beauty experiences.

In terms of user data, women account for 80%, men account for 20%, and the unit price of male customers is not weaker than that of women. For anti-aging, botulinum toxin, hyaluronic acid and other products, users will buy multiple times.

Li Xiaohui said that the core of the Meituan platform is "eating, drinking and having fun", and the transaction attribute is high-frequency. At this stage, it is involved in the low-frequency business of medical beauty, which has the opportunity to deepen user value.

Industry data show that by 2020, the size of China’s medical beauty market will reach 460 billion yuan, and the growth rate will remain above 30%. However, the population penetration rate of the medical beauty market is only 2%, the market is still in the early stage, and the market is "mixed", fake drugs, parallel imports, unlicensed doctors, unlicensed clinics and other industry chaos still exists.

How can internet platforms ensure the safety of medical and aesthetic consumption?

Since medical beauty products are service attributes, not standard products, there are unsafe factors in several links such as drugs, institutions, and services. For Internet platforms, opportunities and challenges coexist.

Li Xiaohui told Surging News that Meituan currently focuses on "light medical beauty", and it is still a conservative strategy to "focus on medical beauty". The so-called "light medical beauty" refers to medical beauty projects that are relatively light in user decision-making, such as hyaluronic acid, botulinum toxin, water light needles, rather than breast augmentation. Li Xiaohui said that the order volume of "light medical beauty" currently accounts for more than 70% on the Meituan platform.

Relatively speaking, "light medical beauty" is also easier to achieve Internet-based. Li Xiaohui introduced that Meituan has special operation personnel to help institutions make products online, and at the same time track these diaries to maintain a certain update frequency. This is to form a closed loop for the entire transaction. Once there is a risk, the platform can also be traced back.

"Before Meituan did medical beauty, many users found it on the search platform, but in fact, users must hope to see on the platform whether this medical beauty institution has qualifications and licenses, whether its reputation is good, how users evaluate it, and whether it is safe." Li Xiaohui told The Paper.

At the investment promotion level, Li Xiaohui said that the platform will conduct strict qualification review. At present, the medical beauty institutions that have settled in Meituan Dianping are all certified, and the qualifications of doctors are open and transparent. There are several large-scale audit teams within the company.

Medical and aesthetic institutions settled in Meituan need "bright certificates"

Meituan announced at the meeting on the same day that the upstream medical and aesthetic drug brands and distribution agencies initiated the establishment of the "Genuine Alliance", which directly displays the authorization information of drug qualifications on the website, and opens the drug scan code verification function in the medical and aesthetic institutions to crack down on counterfeit and shoddy products. The first batch of partners include Ruilan, Huaxi Bio, Aierjian, etc. This can also solve the problem of opaque prices to a certain extent.

According to reports, Meituan Dianping also provides optional insurance services with an advance compensation mechanism.