Qiming Venture Partners' portfolio company Dingdong Maicai (NYSE: DDL) on June 29th EST listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The issue price is US$ 23.5/ADS, representing a market cap of US$ 5.539 billion.
Dingdong Maicai is a leading and fast-growing online grocery company in China. The company’s mission is “to make fresh groceries as available as running water to every household”. Dingdong provides fresh groceries as its core product category while expanding to providing otherdaily necessities. The company has become a leading one-stop online shopping destination in China for consumers to make purchases for their daily lives.
Qiming Venture Partners participated in the Dingdong’s Ser B4 and Ser C1 round. The listing of Dingdong Maicai is the seventh public listing in Qiming’s portfolio in 2021.
In May 2017, Dingdong started its business in Shanghai. The company has become one of the pioneers in using a frontline fulfillment grid model to efficiently achievelast-mile delivery for fresh groceries. As of March 31st, 2021, Dingdong had built from the ground up a frontline fulfillment grid of more than 950 frontline fulfillment stations in 29 cities in China. Dingdong delivers almost one million orders per day, and target to get orders within 30 minutes to users.
Dingdong’s total GMV has grown from RMB741.7 million in 2018 to RMB13,032.2 million (US$1,989.1 million) in 2020, representing a CAGR of 319.2%. This growth rate ranked first among the top five on-demand e-commerce platforms in China and significantly outpaced the overall market size growth rate of 114.6% during the same period, according to China Insights Consultancy (CIC), an independent research firm.
Dingdong is working to modernize China’s traditional agricultural supply chain through standardization and digitalization, empowering upstream farms and suppliers to make their production more efficient and tailored to actual demand. The company established a smart supply chain system that runs through the entire chain of user ordering, base procurement, sorting warehouses, and frontline fulfillment grid distribution, improving logistics efficiency and user experience.
“Wet market digitalization is the infrastructure of fresh food e-commerce. Dingdong is increasing its investment in research and development of the smart fresh food supply chain system. It will promote the digital transformation to empower upstream farms and suppliers," Liang Changlin, the founder and CEO of Dingdong Maicai, earlier said in an interview.
“The fresh food market is a trillion-dollar market. Dingdong empowers the entire supply chain via digitalization and brings convenience to consumers. In the consumer sector, apart from Dingdong, we noticed that nowadays, Chinese people are having increasing demands for local consumer brands. We are optimistic about the opportunities in local brands along with the opportunities in the related tech arena. We will continue to look for quality companies that bring tech-enabled transformation to traditional industries,” said Duane Kuang, Founding Managing Partner at Qiming Venture Partners.
