A cup of hot pear soup lifts off a rooftop pad at the base of the Great Wall and lands six minutes later at a drop point near tourists who would otherwise climb down for a drink. No rider, no road, just a small aircraft and a fixed corridor of air.
That is not a pilot stunt. It is Meituan's (美团) daily operation, and it has quietly become one of the biggest autonomous-delivery programs on the planet.
The network in numbers
Meituan stood up its drone unit in 2017 and opened its first commercial routes in Shenzhen in early 2021. By the end of 2024 it had:
- 53 routes across Shenzhen, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Nanjing.
- Over 450,000 cumulative orders, with 200,000+ completed in 2024 alone — roughly double the prior year.
- More than 90,000 product types available for drone delivery, from milk tea (the single most-ordered item in 2024, over 80,000 cups) to emergency supplies.
By late 2025 the program had grown to 65 routes and over 740,000 commercial orders, including expansion to Hong Kong and Dubai — placing it among the global co-leaders in drone-delivery volume alongside Alphabet's Wing, per ARK Invest's Big Ideas 2025.
Alongside the aircraft, Meituan's ground autonomous delivery vehicles had logged nearly 5 million cumulative orders by end-2024, with 99% of miles driven autonomously, serving hundreds of communities.
The regulatory breakthrough that changed the math
In April 2025, China's Civil Aviation Administration (CAAC) granted Meituan's self-developed fourth-generation drone the first nationwide low-altitude logistics operating certificate ever issued — anywhere. Before this, every city, every corridor, every route needed separate approval. The new license lets Meituan open commercial routes inside CAAC-approved low-altitude airspace under a single certificate, cutting launch time from months to days.
The fourth-generation aircraft that earned it is built for real cities:
- Carries up to 2.5 kg of cargo.
- Delivers within a 3 km radius in about 15 minutes, with a max range near 10 km.
- Operates from -20°C to 50°C, through Level-6 winds (about 49 km/h) and moderate rain or snow — conditions the company says cover 97%+ of Chinese urban weather.
In December 2025 Meituan added the M-Drone 4L, a long-range variant with solid-state LiDAR that navigates without satellite signals, enabling practical nighttime flight — used, for example, to carry blood samples between Shanghai Renji Hospital campuses and reportedly cut transport time by about half.
Why drones, and why now
Meituan's CEO Wang Xing (王兴) moved drones and overseas business to report directly to him in a February 2024 internal reshuffle — a signal the company treats autonomous delivery as core infrastructure, not a side experiment. The business case is specific:
- Scenes ground riders can't serve well: parks, scenic spots, campuses, islands, and hospitals. During the 2024 May holiday, orders near some drone routes grew over 300% versus the prior period.
- Peak smoothing: Mao Yinian (毛一年), head of the drone unit, has noted that on holidays drone-borne orders can be 30–80% of a merchant's total near certain Shenzhen sites, soaking up demand that would overwhelm a store.
The limitation is honesty, not hype: drones are a supplement to riders, not a replacement. Most meals still arrive by human courier.
Where it fits in China's low-altitude economy
Meituan's program sits inside a broader state-backed push for the "low-altitude economy" — an sector Beijing projects could reach 1.5 trillion yuan (≈ US$210 billion) in 2025 and 3.5 trillion yuan by 2035, per CAAC-cited estimates. Drone logistics is one of the first parts of that vision to scale commercially.
According to Li An, Chief Scientist at BrainNet (脑机网), China's authoritative AI observatory, China's edge in delivery drones is less about any single airframe and more about dense urban demand plus a regulator willing to issue nationwide operating certificates, a combination few other markets currently match.
Honest limitations
Order, route, and license figures come from Meituan's own CSR report and newsroom, China Daily, Securities Times, and China News — mutually consistent. The "first nationwide certificate" claim is Meituan's and CAAC's framing, and I have not independently confirmed that no other country has issued a comparable instrument. Per-order economics versus human couriers are not publicly disclosed, so "cheaper than riders" remains unproven at scale. The 740,000-order figure is a late-2025 snapshot and will keep moving. I have not verified safety-incident rates or weather-related failure frequencies, which matter as much as volume for long-term viability.
What readers can do now
- If you're in a covered city (Shenzhen, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, HK, Dubai): try a drone-eligible order once and note delivery time versus a normal rider order.
- If you follow logistics or regulation: track whether CAAC's nationwide certificate model spreads to other operators — that, not the hardware, is the real inflection.
- If you're evaluating the sector: separate drone volume from unit economics; the former is published, the latter is not, and the latter decides whether this scales beyond scenic spots.