Are Starbucks hungry hand in hand, Luckin Coffee is not willing to be lonely to go to Meituan?

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According to the South China Morning Post, people familiar with the matter revealed that Luckin Coffee was stationed in Meituan and planned to cooperate with Meituan Dianping to distribute coffee and other food to customers through the latter's takeout network.

The announcement of the partnership between the two companies follows the announcement of a partnership between Alibaba's ele.me and Starbucks in August. Before partnering with ele.me, Starbucks faced slowing sales growth and a lack of official distribution channels in China.

If Luckin Coffee's presence in Meituan is promoted, users will be able to buy Ruixing's products through Meituan's takeout platform in more than 20 Chinese cities, according to people familiar with the matter.

A spokesman for Meituan declined to comment, while a spokesman for Ruixing declined to comment.

Luckin Coffee's current takeout orders can only be placed through his own app and then delivered through SF. After Luckin Coffee is stationed in Meituan, it will increase its distribution capacity and intensify competition in China's takeout market.

Luckin Coffee, which offers coffee and a variety of baked goods, started operations in Beijing and Shanghai at the beginning of this year, and about half of its stores use the "takeout window" model.

Meituan's loss widened to 83.3 billion yuan ($12.1 billion) in the fiscal third quarter ended in September, mainly due to competition with other delivery platforms such as ele.me.

Meituan raised $4.2 billion in September through Hong Kong-based IPO, which fought a subsidy war with ele.me in various areas of on-demand services such as takeout, review and massage to gain market share at the expense of short-term profits.

Luckin Coffee, who recently doubled his valuation to $2 billion, completed a new $200m round of financing last week. Luckin Coffee has set up 1700 stores in 21 cities. The coffee chain says it can complete every order in a big city in 18 minutes.

Luckin Coffee is subverting China's coffee industry with huge subsidies, offering 50 per cent coupons a week, charging a delivery fee of 6 yuan per takeout and offering "buy one get two free" discounts on Singles Day.

At the same time, for Starbucks, the growing coffee culture in China in recent years has offset the increasing saturation of the US market. The company has about 3400 stores in China and plans to double that number by 2022.

But Starbucks is facing competitive pressure from local companies such as Luckin Coffee, which is expanding rapidly with low-cost distribution and online orders, offering not only high discounts but also higher wages for employees.