It makes sense that they wouldn't buy the HK business. Operating in HK essentially means entering the Chinese market, which feels like a bold responsibility for Doordash to take on. Better to let a company that's better positioned to buy out that part of the business.
Interestingly, here in the Phoenix market, with plenty of competing delivery services, there is at least one Chinese native service that competes with the “round eyes”.
Next door in Mesa, there is a significant designated Asian Quarter. So there is a high concentration of Asian restaurants and grocery stores. On a few occasions when ordering DoorDash from one of the big Chinese places, someone from the Chinese service delivered it instead; all receipts were printed in Chinese and sometimes I apparently received someone else’s order entirely.
I believe they did this on purpose to promote use of that native service for this set of restaurants. Unfortunately I don’t feel like reaching out to them or installing their weird Chinese language app, so I decided to simply steer clear of those most authentic restaurants instead.
From a business standpoint, operating in China means basically every aspect of your operations need to be duplicated and built from scratch. Accounting, legal, compliance, engineering. People in China don't use the same payment methods. Hiring people is different. The ability to reuse your existing business knowledge and infrastructure is completely kneecapped.
You're likely referring to HungryPanda (熊猫外卖), which has carved out quite a niche in this and now operates across the US, Canada, Australia, Asia (outside China), Europe, etc.
I actually use this, I'm really into authentic Chinese food and some of the places aren't on the mainstream delivery apps but are on HungryPanda. The app is pretty bad but usable.
My Chinese-speaking friend told me that the business name translates to "rice balls". Fantuan appears to have a large presence in Anglophone countries such as AUS, CA, US.
And yes, any app that would be in the Chinese language is utterly weird and foreign to me. I can't even read or sound out the characters. I'd be more comfortable in a Hebrew or Arabic app, frankly. They would be "less weird" to me. Feel free to call me a racist bigot, but I'm an ordinary American.
