According to a UBS research report from March 2026, as of February this year, the daily average order volume across JD.com, Taobao Flash Purchase and Meituan was approximately 110 million orders; based on a skilled rider completing 30 to 40 orders per day, the current order scale would theoretically require only about 4 million riders to handle, while the entire industry has close to 20 million registered riders — even after excluding multi-platform duplicate registrations and dormant accounts, there is still a structural overcapacity of more than 16 million riders, creating a situation where over 5 riders are competing for a single order. In the food delivery war that began in February 2025, JD.com entered aggressively with 10 billion yuan in subsidies, Alibaba’s Taobao Flash Purchase followed with over 50 billion yuan, and Meituan was forced onto the defensive. During that war alone, the three platforms added over 8 million new riders. According to an HSBC research report, from Q2 2025 to Q1 2026, the combined losses of the three platforms amounted to approximately 173 billion yuan; among them, Meituan’s net loss for the full year 2025 was 102.9 billion yuan, with marketing expenses reaching 102.9 billion yuan, JD.com’s new business lost 46.6 billion yuan, and Alibaba’s instant retail business lost about 87 billion yuan.
The pressure on riders has moved from numbers to concrete livelihoods. In Shanghai, some riders’ monthly income has fallen from 15,000 yuan during peak periods to around 12,000 yuan, with daily order volume down by nearly 20 orders; in Beijing, the average daily number of orders received by riders fell from 35 in 2020 to 20, while working hours extended from 8 to 12 hours; the basic delivery fee was slashed from 6 to 9 yuan during the war to 3 to 4 yuan, and some short-distance orders have dropped below 2 yuan. Professor Zhan Jing from Capital University of Economics and Business defined this as a combination of stock competition and low-level repetitive competition, pointing out that platforms are systematically shifting the cost of competition onto workers. How to absorb the delivery capacity bubble and rebuild the rider ecosystem will become the core issue for the industry in the next phase.