Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Meituan Second Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. All participants are in a listen-only mode. There will be a presentation, followed by a question and answer session. If you wish to ask a question, you will need to press the star key, followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to hand the conference over to Ms. Scarlett Xu, VP and Head of Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
Thank you, operator. Good evening and good morning, everyone. Welcome to our second quarter of 2024 earnings conference call. Joining us today are Mr. Xing Wang, Chairman and CEO, and Mr. Shaohui Chen, Senior Vice President and CFO of Meituan. For today's call, management will first provide a review of our second quarter of 2024 results and then conduct a Q&A session. Before we start, we would like to remind you that our presentation contains forward-looking statements, which include a number of risks and uncertainties and may differ from actual results in the future. This presentation also contains audited non-IFRS accounting standards financial measures that should be considered in addition to and not as a substitute for measures of the company's financial performance prepared in accordance with IFRS accounting standards.
For a detailed discussion of risk factors and non-IFRS accounting standards measures, please refer to the disclosure documents in the IR section of our website. Now I will turn the call over to Mr. Xing Wang. Please go ahead, Xing.
Thank you, Scarlett. Hello, everyone. In the second quarter, we adapted to the latest consumption environment, and we actively iterated our products and operations and achieved solid results. During the second quarter, our total revenue increased by 21% year-over-year to RMB 28.3 billion. Adjusted net profit increased by 77.6% to RMB 13.6 billion. Adjusted net profit margin improved significantly both year on year and quarter-over-quarter to 16.5%. Our annual transacting user and annual active merchants maintained a strong growth momentum and reached new highs to 753 million and 30 million respectively. Also, average purchase frequency per annual transacting user increased, marking the 15th consecutive quarter of sequential growth since mid-2020.
As a one-stop local commerce platform in China, we effectively satisfy consumer demand for local services through our comprehensive product offerings and on-demand delivery. We support the local merchants throughout their operation cycle and across various marketing scenarios. Compared to other sectors, the local commerce industry in China still has a significant growth potential from digital transformation. We will continue to implement our retail plus technology strategy, use technology to promote industry growth, and fulfill our mission to help people eat better, live better. In the second quarter, we continued to Core Local Commerce segment and improve its operational efficiency. The goal of our recent organizational restructuring is not only to integrate the on-demand delivery, in-store, hotel, and travel businesses. What's more important is to better align consumer demand with our platform supply.
Subsequently, Meituan platform and Meituan infrastructure platform and each business unit in Core Local Commerce will better develop and realize more synergies. We view Core Local Commerce as a whole when it comes to long-term business planning, operational strategy, and resource allocation, and product integration. We hope to empower each business with effective traffic support from Meituan platform and foster closer collaborations, create synergies, and realize more cross-sells. This will bring further integration between the demand side and the supply side and further strengthen our brand's awareness. For example, our Shen Hui Yuan membership program, which we expanded nationwide in July, is our very first marketing scheme that covers all categories across on-demand delivery and in-store, hotel, and travel. Shen Hui Yuan evolved from the membership program for our on-demand delivery business.
It effectively enhanced the user transaction frequency of on-demand delivery and also brought incremental sales to restaurant merchants and helped them operate more efficiently. With this newly integrated membership program, we can deepen collaborations with an expanded network of merchants with a higher efficiency, allowing merchants to benefit from user traffic. Meanwhile, our members will have access to more diverse selections of value-for-money products and services across all categories in the local commerce domain.... In addition, we recently introduced a new brand, Meituan Group Buy [Foreign language] . It covers all local service categories, including in-store dining, leisure and entertainment, attraction ticketing, beauty services, and more. Going forward, we will focus on this new brand and enhance consumer mindshare in Meituan Group Buy more stores, more savings.
[Foreign language] . Overall, we will continue to explore collaborations within Core Local Commerce with the Meituan platforms to raise our product and services offerings, and provide the best-in-class experience for both merchants and consumers. Now let's walk through each business in our Core Local Commerce. In the second quarter, on-demand delivery maintained a steady growth. For food delivery, thanks to years of business iterations, we have successfully cultivated a strong consumer mindshare in speed and variety. While we are focused on improving operations and marketing in our self shop-based model, we further enhanced our consumer mindshare in value for money offerings to adapt to the evolving consumption trend. We deep dived into each consumption category and scenario, such as travel, weekend, and late night snacks to incentivize demand.
During the quarter, average order grew by almost 40% year-over-year, and orders from late night snacks grew much faster than the average. Our refined operation and marketing strategies have led to improvement in user stickiness, as well as steady growth in user scale and purchase frequency of mid to high-frequency users. On the supply side, we actively explored new products formats to capture different consumption of consumer demand, and especially in the low price end. Pin Hao Fan did exceptionally well this quarter. Peak daily order volume broke 8 million, setting a new record. This quarter, we worked closely with the branded restaurant to introduce more high quality, value for money offerings for Pin Hao Fan, and further improve our products and user experience. Subsequently, both user retention and frequency were largely enhanced.
As the consumers Pin Hao Fan's high quality, value for money features, their demand also extended from lunch and dinner to other discretionary categories, like beverage and late night snacks. After our continuous iteration Pin Hao Fan model, it has now become a new growth driver for many small and medium-sized restaurants. It also helps branded restaurants improve single store productivity and attracting young Pin Hao Fan, merchants can effectively manage, make heat products and offer low price in exchange for high order volume. This allows merchants to unleash more economies of scale. In addition, merchants can cut costs and enhance efficiency by using our platform's direct procurement and group delivery. Therefore, merchants can pass savings to consumers through lower price.
Going forward, we will continue to help merchant optimize efficiency, help them improve SKU selections, and broaden their price bands to attract more price-sensitive consumers. For branded restaurant, last quarter, we launched the branded satellite stores in [Foreign language] . This quarter, we worked with more brands such as Lao Xiang Ji and Haidilao, to help them open more satellite stores, thus bringing more quality selection and low price for our consumers. Looking ahead, we will continue to innovate our supply formats, penetrate deeper into the supply chain, help merchant improve efficiency and pricing ability, and consistently provide the value for money products for consumers. The Meituan Instashopping posted another robust growth, and on-demand retail has become a significant growth driver for local retailers. It is also a reliable shopping channel for consumers.
We see steady increase in Meituan Instashopping's annual transacting user base, and even faster growth in order frequency in this quarter, to precisely capture the latest trend in diversity and personalized consumptions, and continue to refine our operations and marketing strategies. Through these measures, we effectively catered to consumer demands across various scenarios, such as holiday gifting, travel, and gathering activities…. During the quarter, we deepened our collaborations with the leading brands in FMCG, apparel, liquor and beverage, and more, and onboarded many branded stores to our platform. In addition, we provided various merchant support measures, such as refined marketing strategy to increase transaction conversion rate and bring incremental sales to these branded merchants. Those categories I just mentioned achieved a steady order growth in the second quarter.
To better cope with the on-demand retail, we proactively penetrate deeper into the industry value chain and expanded Meituan InstaMart, [Foreign language] , to abroad regions. In high densities, we increased the density of Meituan InstaMart. In lower densities, we also deepened the penetration to drive strong order volume growth. Meituan InstaMart is a marketplace model where merchants rent and operate brand distribution warehouses, and we help merchants with online planning operations, offering traffic support, product selection recommendations, and pricing strategy, and et cetera. This new supply format effectively matches supply with demand for on-demand retail. The value of our Meituan InstaMart is gradually recognized by offline retailers. An increasing number of leading offline brands chose to work with us.
They can fully capitalize their advantages in the supply chain by leveraging our location-based marketing strategy, online solutions, and efficiency and efficient delivery network to offer consumers value for money products through on-demand retail. For certain categories, we penetrated deeper into the supply chain and adopted in-house procurement. For example, we have a self-operated brand Waima Songjiu in the liquor and beverage category, and continue to expand in scale. Waima Songjiu has integrated a self-operated supply chain, and plus front distribution warehouses, plus self-operated delivery. This model effectively meets consumers' instant consumption needs. And in second quarter, Waima achieved a record high GTV. For the medicine category, we further strengthened consumer mindshare, built stronger capacity to satisfy seasonal demand, and enhanced our product accessibility in health supplements.
In July, we rolled out online medical insurance payment channel for most OTC products in a few cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, and Qingdao. Consumers can choose insurance cover of pharmacies and drugs on our platform and enjoy 30 minutes delivery to their doorsteps. Going forward, under the guidance of local authorities, we will work closely with chain pharmacies and expand to the coverage of stores and drugs that can use medical insurance payment to provide consumers with convenience and health services. Overall, the adoption of on-demand retail for more traditional brands and merchants, coupled with an accelerated expansion of a new supply formats, further enhanced the competitive advantages of Meituan Instashopping on the supply side. It has helped enhance user experience and increase group purchase frequency, and that builds a solid foundation for our resilient growth despite facing external challenges.
In addition, the long-term sustainable development of our on-demand business depends on the continuous optimization of our delivery network and the hard work of our couriers. To address the challenges couriers face, Meituan launched courier-friendly communities and courier-friendly merchants. Currently, we have established courier-friendly communities in more than 20 cities nationwide. To facilitate the easy access for couriers in residential areas, we introduced a digital solution in collaboration with the various major property management companies, enhancing their delivery experience. Additionally, we worked with more than 10,000 stores of branded restaurant and healthcare services brands to provide rest stations, beverage, and discounted meals for our couriers.
Looking forward, under the supervision of relevant local authorities, we will continue to collaborate with the broader society, including local community, property management companies, chain brands, and carrier merchants, to accelerate the promotion of courier-friendly community as a solution, introduce more resting scenarios, and provide more discounted services to enhance couriers' sense of belonging and happiness. In the second quarter, our in-store hotel and travel business maintained a strong growth, thanks to the continued digital transformation in local services, as well as consumers' rising demand for diversity and value for money. Order volume increased by over 60% year-over-year. Annual transacting user increased by nearly 35% year-over-year, and annual active merchants reached a new high. For our in-store business, we continue to leverage our shop-based model and mega heat products, expanding our value for money products and services offerings for consumers.
Through our shop-based model, particularly by leveraging our Meituan Group Buy brand, [Foreign language], we continued to satisfy consumer demand for value for money products. Recently, we put more efforts into the marketing campaign of [Foreign language]. We launched online and offline joint marketing events in 15 cities, especially during holiday seasons like Labor Day and Dragon Boat Festival. This strengthened the consumer mind share of more save, more store, more service [Foreign language], and continued to expand our user base. On top of that, we continued to promote mega heat products by leveraging special deals, [Foreign language], and many other operational tactics. These measures effectively captured the consumer market demand for deep discounted deals and boost our Chinese user base and order volume.
We also continue to invest in lower tier markets to effectively digitize both supply and demand, and help accelerate online penetration of local services in these new markets. In addition, after we upgraded our Shen Hui Yuan program, consumers can now use coupons in in-store hotel and travel categories, which further strengthened the consumer mind share in our value for money offerings. Shen Hui Yuan is also widely welcomed by our merchants. In current macro environment, consumer demand for local services remain intact, with new consumption trends emerging and subtle changes in consumer preference. For in-store dining, demand has expanded from formal meals to lighter meals and beverage snacks, such as food, fast food, coffee and tea. Those categories are doing well. To adapt to this change, we swiftly onboarded more light meal and beverage supplies.
Our in-store business recently promoted the Pick Up Now service, [Foreign language] , that allows consumer to buy and validate coupons online simultaneously, so that they won't waste time queuing and validate the coupons offline, making deals in a more convenient way and enhancing the user experience. With the Pick Up Now service as a complement to our food delivery and in-store dining service format. Currently, Pick Up Now covers popular categories such as coffee and tea. We have partnered with 46 chain brands and around 90,000 restaurants to offer Pick Up Now, and have served over 20 million users in hundreds of cities. During the second quarter, we launched our 2024 Must-Eat List, [audio distortion] , covering nearly 2,800 cities.
Covering nearly 2,800 restaurants in over 100 cities. That's more than ever. Majority of the restaurants on our list are localized restaurants, and nearly 20% are daddies. We provided online traffic support and operational guidance for the listed merchants, especially those small and medium-sized merchants, helping them enhance store exposure, online operation, and efficiency. For other in-store services, there is a trend that consumers want to enjoy diversity and low price in the leisure and entertainment category. We actively capture this evolving trend, improve operation in certain popular categories, capitalizing on our advantages in supply, brand recognition, and service quality. We aim to become the consumer's top choice when they look for little happiness, for those type of consumptions.
Specifically, leisure and entertainment posted a strong growth with GTV and order volume growth growing over 60% year-over-year. And GTV from beauty and medical aesthetics also increased by over 50% year-over-year. For the hotel business, both our domestic room nights and GTV experienced a steady growth during the second quarter. We expanded the efforts in branding, promotion, and integrated marketing strategies around the major holidays such as Labor Day holiday and Dragon Boat Festival. During the 10-year anniversary celebration of our hotel business, we launched a dedicated marketing campaign and effectively incentivized demand. As more and more travelers now focus on culture and experience, we continue to enhance our supply and product format.
For example, we integrated our Hotel +X package deals and leverage our platform advantage to offer consumers high-quality, value for money products, while helping merchants cross-sell other services beyond accommodations. Under the current macro environment, demand for low-star hotels has increased. Our unparalleled advantage in this domain, especially on the supply side, position us well to withstand this new environment. During the quarter, we further strengthened our supply capabilities in low-star hotels. We catered to consumers differentiated preference and expanded our value for money offerings. Transaction conversion and room nights have increased subsequently. On the merchant side, we provided comprehensive online solutions to address the operational needs from traffic acquisition to business growth, to room renovations and helping low-star hotels capture more growth opportunities.
In the high-star domain, we recently launched the 2024 Must-Stay List, [Foreign language] , featuring over 1,100 hotels. We further expanded our city coverage and included Hong Kong and Macau in the list for the first time. In June, we held a special live streaming session to promote the Must-Stay List, setting a new GTV record in hotel live streaming. In addition, we deepened our joint membership program with the high-star hotel groups, adding exclusive discount and late checkout privilege to the member benefits. We also launched joint marketing events with high-star hotels, featuring better product exposure and attracting new users to the merchants. And now let's move on to our new initiatives segment. For Meituan Select, we continued to improve its operation efficiency in the second quarter.
By continually enhancing our product quality and strengthening supplies, operations, collaborations, we effectively increased our price per item and price recovery ratio. On the fulfillment side, we further improved efficiency and brought elevated experience for consumers. We also increased the proportion of orders delivered by 11:00 A.M., which will help us penetrate into more consumption scenarios. Moreover, we enhanced our marketing efficiency and optimized resource allocation. All these efforts led to substantial loss reduction for the business on both potential and year-over-year basis. Our Xiaoxiang Supermarket, [Foreign language] , is one of the key components of our on-demand retail strategy. It has become a convenient and reliable source for people to shop grocery online. During the second quarter, we made positive progress across various areas, including products, operations, and fulfillments.
And it's worthwhile to mention that we extended the business hours to 2:00 A.M. in selected locations, allowing us to capture more nighttime consumption scenarios and enhance user experience. In the second quarter, growth for [Foreign language] continued to outpace industry peers with efficiency further improving. And the other new initiatives, including our B2B food service distribution and our restaurant stack, our bike sharing and shared power banks, they all posted strong performance in the second quarter. And we have not only achieved the market leadership in scale, but also improved operational efficiency. Our new initiatives help strengthen the entire ecosystem, increase consumer and merchant engagement through our comprehensive offerings, and it will gradually unlock more financial value in future. And the local commerce market in China has a very big total addressable market and large growth potential.
As a market leader, we are confident to navigate through the cycles, facilitate industrial digital transformation, unlocking greater value in the long term. We will actively adapt to the changing consumption trends and tap deep into the supply chain and offer comprehensive products and services to meet diverse demand across categories. In addition, we will continue to provide the merchants with efficient marketing tools and online operational solutions. We aim to continuously enhance value for our consumers, merchants, couriers, and all business partners in our ecosystem. We want to drive high-quality development in China's local commerce industry, and fulfill our mission to help people eat better, live better. With that, I will turn the call over to Shaohui for an update on financial results.
Thank you, Xing. Hello, everyone. I will now go through our second quarter financial results. During this quarter, our businesses sustained healthy growth, with our total revenue increasing by 21% year-over-year to RMB 82.3 billion. Cost of revenue ratio decreased 3.8 percentage points year-over-year to 58.8%, primarily due to the improved gross margin of our goods retail business and lower delivery cost as a percentage of revenue in our on-demand delivery business. Selling and marketing expenses ratio decreased 3.4 percentage points year-over-year to 18%, thanks to our enhanced marketing efficiency. R&D expenses ratio decreased year-over-year to 6.5%, primarily benefiting from improved operating leverage. G&A expenses ratio was 3.3%, slightly increased on a year-over-year basis. Second quarter is usually the best quarter in terms of profitability due to seasonality in our business.
In time, our dedication to pursuing quality growth and enhancing operational efficiency continued to yield positive results. Every profitability metric set new records in this quarter, marking the highest levels since our listing. Our quarterly profits surpassed 10 billion mark for the first time. Net profit for the period, adjusted net profit, reached RMB 11.4 billion and RMB 13.6 billion, respectively, while the corresponding margin climbing to 13.8% and 16.5%, respectively. Turning to our cash position, as of June 30th, 2024, we maintained our strong net cash position, with our cash and cash equivalents and short-term treasury investment totaling RMB 133.3 billion. Cash generated from operating activities increased meaningfully year-over-year to RMB 19.1 billion. Now let's look at our second result, starting with Core Local Commerce.
Core Local Commerce segment increased by 18.5% year-over-year to RMB 60.7 billion. We set new records for both its operating profit and operating margin this quarter, with operating profit increasing by 36.8% to RMB 15.2 billion, and operating margin climbed to 25.1%. Our on-demand delivery business further delivered by leadership and delivered resilient results during this quarter. On-demand order volume achieved significant year-over-year growth this quarter, despite external challenges, and Meituan Instashopping maintained rapid growth, with its year-over-year order volume growth far exceeding that of food delivery. We converted more than 60% of delivery users to Meituan Instashopping users, which stimulate more cross-sales among different categories. As a result, users purchase frequency of the overall on-demand delivery further increased on both year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter basis during this quarter.
We are confident that the long-term growth potential of on-demand delivery remains substantial. Notably, on August 7th, the peak daily order volume for on-demand delivery broke 98 million. Revenue of on-demand delivery grew faster than the order volume on a year-over-year basis. Although the consumption changes continued to weigh on AOV for our on-demand delivery business, the year-over-year decline in AOV started to normalize this quarter. In time, marketing demand from restaurants, offline retailers, and brands remained strong, with the scale of advertising merchants for both food delivery and Meituan Instashopping growing by more than 20% year-over-year. Once again, all our marketing services revenue for on-demand delivery delivered remarkable growth. Meanwhile, we saw more operating leverage as the business scales up. We're also managing to promote user frequency growth to enhance the subsidy efficiency.
Delivery cost per order is usually the lowest during the second quarter, given generally weather conditions across the country. On top of that, we continue to benefit from the abundant supply of couriers and further optimize our delivery capacity structure. Meanwhile, as the order contribution from Pin Hao Fan increased meaningfully year-over-year this quarter, we are also able to achieve more delivery cost savings on order basis, thanks to its group delivery model. Year-over-year growth in on-demand operating profit outpaced the growth in order volume and revenue, thanks to the improved advertising monetization, as well as the optimization in costs and expenses, which offset the decline in AOV. The unit economics of both food delivery and the Meituan Instashopping improved year-over-year this quarter. Our Instashopping hotel and travel business also sustained their leadership and delivered another robust growth.
GTV for in-store business continued its rapid growth trajectory this quarter, with both the number of transacting users and merchant base hitting new records. Our expanded suppliers enhanced products and content, refined operation and marketing strategies enable us to accurately cater to demand across a variety of local commerce categories. Leisure and entertainment, ATVs, or UG [in structure], all experienced rapid growth in transaction volume. In the meantime, as the scale of the lower-tier market increased rapidly, we also saw continuous enhancement in operating efficiency in those markets. However, the GTV growth for hotel and travel significantly lagged behind the growth of in-store, given the last year's high base and also more balanced supply and demand. Revenue of in-store and travel grew at a slower pace than GTV, and the gap between revenue growth and GTV growth significantly narrowed compared to the last quarter.
Transaction-based service revenue continued to show robust growth, and its growth was quite in line with GTV growth. The year-over-year growth of online marketing services revenue continued to trail behind, mainly because of the change of our subscription service charge. Nevertheless, underlying marketing service revenue contribution [audio distortion] an upward trend sequentially. [audio distortion], the expansion of the advertising merchant base of performance-based ads drove strong year-over-year growth in performance-based ads revenue this quarter. Operating profit for Instashopping hotel and travel business achieved a healthy year-over-year growth. Operating profit margin also continued to improve on a sequential basis, mainly attributed to the increase in online marketing services revenue contribution and the improvement in marketing and operation efficiency. Turning to our new initiatives segment.
During the quarter, revenue in this segment achieved an accelerated year-over-year growth of 28.7%, reaching RMB 21.6 billion, mainly due to the development of our goods retail business, particularly from Xiaoxiang Supermarket and [audio distortion]. In time, the segment further accelerated its loss reduction this quarter. The segment's operating loss and operating loss ratio both narrowed significantly on both quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year basis to RMB 1.3 billion and 6.1%, respectively. The loss reduction was primarily attributed to the sequential efficiency improvement of Meituan Select. We continue to implement strict cost-cutting and efficiency improvement measures for Meituan Select, such as raising price markup ratio, lowering user subsidy, and shut down underperforming warehouses. In time, most of the other new initiatives continued to achieve healthy growth while improving operating efficiency.
The profitability of all the other new initiatives, excluding Meituan Select, further improved on a collective basis. With regards to our buyback program, we've repurchased over $2 billion worth of shares before the blackout started. It represents more than 2.1% of total shares outstanding. Our board has approved us to cancel all the repurchased shares to further reduce our share count. To conclude, we proactively adapted to evolving consumption trends and improved our operation and product across all businesses. Our Core Local Commerce demonstrated resilient growth once again, with improving operating profit and operating margin. Concurrently, our commitment to enhancing efficiency in our new initiatives has led to a significant reduction in losses. Looking ahead, we will actively seize growth opportunity across our businesses while striking a balance between growth and profitability.
We will continue to pursue quality growth strategy for our business and consistently improve operating, operational efficiency. We also believe that there will be more synergy among core businesses to come in future. Thank you.
With that, now we are open for Q&A.
Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star two. If you're on a speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask your question. Your first question comes from Ronald Keung with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Thank you, Xing, Shaohui, Scarlett, and Wen. So I wanna ask that the external environment remains quite challenging, and particularly we've seen the consumption weakness in restaurants, the catering industry. So how should we assess the impact on Meituan's Core Local Commerce, and what strategies does the company have in place to mitigate these macroeconomic impacts? And lastly, what's our growth expectation in the current macro setup? Thank you.
Thank you, Ronald, and yes, the evolving consumption trends have indeed brought varying degrees of challenges across industries. Our local commerce remain vibrant and dynamic. We see consumers increasingly look for personalized and diverse experience. Our products and services are well aligned with these changing preferences. We effectively meet consumer demand in dining, leisure, entertainment, and more, and we cover a wider range of categories and price bands, and continue to explore new supply formats and optimize our products, so these measures allow us to better capture emerging trends, satisfy diverse demand, and bring more potential for our long-term growth.
In the second quarter, despite the external impact on order volume growth and our refined operation across consumption scenarios continued to drive steady growth in both user scale and purchase frequency of mid to higher frequency users. Also, our innovation in the new supply formats, such as the Pin Hao Fan, effectively meet the demands from price-sensitive users. Pin Hao Fan has become a preferred choice for many people seeking value for money products. It has also become a new growth driver for a number of small and medium-sized restaurants and also branded restaurants. In this quarter, the order contribution from Pin Hao Fan continued to rise, and thanks to its efficient group delivery model, we were able to save delivery costs on per order basis. And Pin Hao Fan has proven to be more efficient for both Meituan and restaurant merchants in addressing low price demand.
So we will continue to deepen penetration in the supply chain and help merchants improve efficiency, and enhance pricing capability, and provide value for money products for more consumers. And for Meituan Instashopping, while the change in consumption trends have impacted the average order value, the impact on order growth has been so far limited. On-demand retail still has very significant potential in online penetration across different geography, category, and scenarios. New supply formats like Meituan InstaMart, [Foreign language] are well recognized because of its compatibility with on-demand retail. These new supply formats not only grow rapidly in the higher tier cities, but also help accelerate penetration of on-demand retail in lower tier cities. We will work closely with leading offline retailer on Meituan InstaMart, and that's expected to drive additional growth in future.
Additionally, as we continue to enhance supply and improve operations, we see considerable growth room in user frequency and their ARPU for Meituan Instashopping. So we believe that on-demand retail will continue to benefit from the ongoing digital transformation process and our continuous development on both the supply and demand side. And for in-store hotel and travel, the penetration overall is still very low. Consumer demand for local services remains strong, but the consumer become more price sensitive and want to seek more value for money deals. All these facts present a significant long-term growth potential, especially as new categories continue to emerge. Our user base and transaction frequency in our in-store hotel and travel maintained healthy growth. Order volumes up by over 60% year-over-year. We also see continued increase in user stickiness awarding share.
In addition, our shared-based business model is very resilient. We have over 200 categories to meet diverse consumer demand, including stores and discounts across price bands. We have also introduced live streaming, [audio distortion] , to incentivize impulse consumption and cater to consumer needs for deep discounts. Additionally, we actively penetrated into lower [densities] for more growth opportunities. As we accelerate the merchant onboarding, optimize products, and strengthen value for money, consumer mindshare, I think we are well positioned to accommodate changes in consumption, consumer needs. And this will allow us to maintain healthy growth in both user base and frequency, thereby mitigating the adverse macro impacts. So overall, we believe our Core Local Commerce segment can maintain steady growth.
The potential for digital transformation remains substantial, and we are confident in our ability to capitalize on the long-term growth opportunities brought by a shift in consumer demand and structural change on the supply side. Thank you.
Thank you, Xing Wang.
Your next question comes from Thomas Chong with Jefferies. Please go ahead.
Hi, good evening. Thanks, management, for taking my question. As the company continues organizational restructuring, could management share with us the synergies achieved so far? Can you also provide update on the upgraded membership program, Shen Hui Yuan? When can we see more synergies to come? Thank you.
Thank you, Thomas. Since the organizational structuring, we have deepened collaborations and enhanced cross-sales among different businesses. We have also integrated operations in Core Local Commerce across many areas, including product development and R&D and marketing. Notably, our upgraded membership program, Shen Hui Yuan , stands out as our very first marketing scheme for integrating our marketing Core Local Commerce. Over the past few years, our membership program has accumulated over 100 million members for our food delivery business. It has not only enhanced the user frequency in on-demand delivery, but also brought substantial business growth for restaurant merchants and helped improve their marketing efficiency. Now, Shen Hui Yuan extend benefits to more categories in our in-store hotel and travel, offering consumers a broader range of value for money products.
Thanks to the membership benefit, some of our food delivery users have started exploring other categories, such as hair salon, massage, home cleaning, and accommodations. We also noticed that some low-frequency users are making transactions on our platform more frequently with more categories. On the merchant side, Shen Hui Yuan further allows us to collaborate more efficiently with a large number of merchants and bring them extensive user traffic from the Meituan platform. We also offer in-store merchant more comprehensive marketing tools to cross-sell from higher frequency food delivery to lower frequency in-store hotel and travel services. By now, Shen Hui Yuan has covered over 2.5 million merchants in-store hotel and travel, and the numbers continue to increase. Many participating merchants have experienced additional growth in order volume and user scale. In addition to Shen Hui Yuan, we continue to launch new cross-selling initiatives.
For example, in travel scenarios, we introduced a special room type that offers free food delivery vouchers, catering to consumers' demand for placing food delivery orders while staying in hotels. This effectively drove growth in both businesses. And generally speaking, we have a clear direction in the organizational restructuring. We have begun enhancing synergies across our businesses. It's too early to quantify the results, and we'll be patient, and we will continue to focus on building our long-term competencies and most from the collaboration and synergies. We have confidence that these synergies will eventually yield a positive financial results. Thank you.
Your next question comes from Alicia Yap with Citigroup. Please go ahead.
Hi, good evening, management. Thanks for taking my questions. Congrats on the solid results. My questions is on, you know, if you look at besides the macro environment, were the food delivery orders also affected by the shift to the offline consumption? So could you share that the recent performance of the food delivery and the Meituan Instashopping, how should we anticipate the growth and the profitability of the on-demand delivery in the second half of the year? Thank you.
Thank you for the question. I'm glad you raised the question on food delivery and also on-demand delivery, and also the relationship between the delivery business and our in-store business. Meituan aims to be a one-stop shopping experience for local services, so we are very glad that we have a good combination of both the delivery services and the in-store business, and that can cater to consumers' different needs. The food delivery and in-store dining are two different business models, and under different demand scenarios. We saw that the consumers' demand for in-store dining expanded from formal meals to more lighter meals, snacks, and beverage, such as fast food, coffee, and tea, and also our in-store buying business effectively capture the shifting demand through our enhanced supply, better product formats, and refined marketing.
We have seen that, since the beginning of this year, our offering and use scenarios has further enriched, either for dining or just pickup, and with very competitive pricing. As a result, consumption volume for our in-store buying business maintained strong growth momentum. We understand that this may potentially impact the food delivery order volume growth in certain categories, but the impact is limited. We still see very different value propositions for food delivery and store buying. We still believe that food delivery itself has a very low online penetration and a very strong value proposition to further increase the frequency, especially with the continuous expansion of our food delivery offerings and fresh brands.
We also want to highlight that although food delivery is where we start for the on-demand business, we have seen more and more categories have joined in the on-demand business. We want to drive the attention from purely food delivery business to a broad on-demand delivery business, because we believe this is going to be important growth driver for the company. We believe that more and more consumers will be converted from purely food delivery users to more cross-selling consumers in broader on-demand delivery. We will enhance operations from mid to high-frequency users and encourage more cross-selling opportunity across this category and drive the user frequency.
As mentioned earlier, we are seeing that our on-demand delivery maintain more than three times the growth rate of our food delivery business, and we believe its strong growth momentum will continue in the following years. Total order volume for on-demand delivery also maintained very strong growth during the summer, especially during some of the very important marketing campaigns, such as our European campaign, the Olympics, and [audio distortion] promotion. This was achieved by expanding supplies across popular consumption categories and scenarios, and optimize both operations and the marketing Pin Hao Fan business also allow us to better serve [audio distortion] users more effectively and continue to drive the growth of order volume. Notably, on August 7th, the peak daily order volume for on-demand delivery grew 98 million, which is a very important milestone for the company.
We are very confident that next year, during similar season, we will see the peak delivery number to exceed a hundred million orders. We believe that this order volume growth momentum is healthy and will continue during the rest of this year. We believe in this business, we can balance growth with profitability. We expect the year-over-year growth in operating profit to be higher than the revenue growth and order volume growth. Shift in consumption trends will continue to impact the average order value of our on-demand delivery, but the AOV decline is expected to be normalized during the second half of the year. As the business scale up, we also expect to realize more operating leverage and to continue to optimize our subsidy efficiency.
So we will continue to see strong demand for merchants, including the advertising on our platform, and we will continue to launch different advertising products to meet those demands. So the advertising revenue will remain strong. And our optimized operation will also help us to improve overall the food delivery efficiency. So overall, we feel very confident on both the food delivery and on-demand delivery business. Thank you.
Your next question comes from Kenneth Fong with UBS. Please go ahead.
Hi, good evening, management. Thanks for taking my questions, and, congrats on the very strong results. I have a question on the local service. We recently heard that competitor will stick to their annual GTV target, and they even step up subsidies for, local service in the third quarter. Could management share some insights on the recent competitive dynamics? For the second half of the year, how do we project the GTV growth, the gap between revenue growth, GTV growth, as well as OP margin? Thank you.
Thank you. For the in-store business, before competition, I would like to share a little bit more of the overall industry. As we mentioned in the earlier quarters, we are seeing the in-store business overall at a very strong and important growth momentum, in that more and more consumption are shifting from offline to online. The online penetration of the services sector in China continued to rise during this quarter, and we proactively adapted to these macro trends and [audio distortion] our products and operating strategy to meet this new trend. We believe a strong growth in Q2 both in our order volume and our GTV. Order volume increased by over 60% year-over-year. At the same time, our operating margin improved quarter-over-quarter.
The business remained very healthy growth, and we think the online penetration will continue to improve in the following quarters. About the competition, overall, we observe that the competitive landscape remained relatively stable in Q2. There are a couple of points I'd like to highlight. First, the industry has experienced rapid development in the last two years. Both other players and ourselves have invested to different business models, and all of those efforts lead to faster growth, but also lead to quite different focus on category mix and merchant tiers. We have seen that the, on the GTV validation rate, it could be very different in different category and also on different platforms. We have continued to see that our validation rate for GTV is much higher than our competitor.
As a result, we have gradually shift our focus to the validated GTV market share for our core categories, which we believe is more relevant, to really understand the quality of the business. Secondly, summer is usually the peak season for local services, and the merchant tend to budget more marketing expenses in order to meet the rising demand for local services. We also expanded our Shen Hui Yuan membership program to nationwide and launched a series of marketing campaigns and brand advertisements. Based on our observation, recent competition in these core categories remain rational and stable. As the industry evolved to a new stage, we believed all the participants will shift from a subsidy, subsidy-driven growth strategy to a more ROI-driven growth strategy. And our strategy will continue to be centered around our own development and to fortify our long-term competitive strength.
We will fully leverage our advantage in the shop-based model and enhance our capability and value for money offerings through special deals [ Foreign language], and to continue to strengthen claim our share in Meituan as the go-to platform for finding stores and the best deals, and to attract more merchants to use us as the primary platform for online operation. We will also capitalize on the synergies Core Local Commerce. For example, in our upgraded Shen Hui Yuan membership program, we direct high-frequency traffic from our on-demand delivery to in-store services, thereby increasing transaction frequency and user stickiness. As we implement lower-tier market strategy at the end of last year, we have seen notable progress across many categories. We will continue to explore ways to revitalize local consumption in the lower-tier market.
Our ongoing efforts will drive further innovation on both the supply side and the demand side. We believe we will continue to lead the lifestyle changes for consumer in long term, and we will also benefit the most from this accelerated online penetration trend. Looking ahead to the second half of this year, after our organizational restructuring, our business is now focusing more on the order growth and the user base. The strong performance of these indicators will drive the GTV growth to maintain its momentum during the rest of this year, and we will see a more normalized monetization rate based in the second half of this year. And the difference between revenue growth and GTV growth will continue to narrow significantly.
In terms of profitability, as we mentioned earlier, [audio distortion] operating margin is not our focus, as it will be impacted by the GTV contribution from different categories, different cities, and the different revenue mix, and also seasonality. Instead, we suggest pay more attention to the operating profit solid growth, which is a more important metric for the business team. We expect we will achieve solid year-over-year operating profit growth for our in-store, community and travel business in the second half of 2024. Thank you.
The next question comes from Ya Jiang with CITIC Securities. Please go ahead.
Hey, and good evening, management. Thanks for taking my question. We've noticed that revenue growth of new initiatives continued to accelerate this quarter. Can you please provide an update on the overall progress of your new initiatives? And also Meituan Select showed significant loss reduction this quarter. How should we think about the loss of Meituan Select in the second half of the year? And how should we think about loss of new initiatives? And lastly, after we expand food delivery in Middle East, how much will overseas expansion impact our loss reduction pace? Thank you.
Thank you, Jiang Ya . So, in second quarter, the revenue from our new initiatives increased by 29% year-over-year, and it's growing faster than the first quarter, and also it's growing faster than our Core Local Commerce. So this growth was mainly driven by very strong from [Foreign language] and [audio distortion]. In this quarter, our initiative segment still losing money, but losing less money. So the loss reduction is making some progress. For Meituan Select, we continue to implement efficiency improvement measures, and we have been doing that since this February, and that lead to a notable sequential loss reduction. As we mentioned last quarter, now we no longer focus on the nationwide market share.
Instead, our priority are loss reduction and efficiency improvement this year. And going into the second half of this year, we will keep optimizing operational efficiency. And how much loss we can cut will also depend on the total business scale, so don't get too excited too quickly. And additionally, we also have expenses in cold chain infrastructure during summer. We need to do that to ensure our product quality. And in order to achieve long-term sustainable development, we must create more value for consumers and build a differentiated competitive advantage for Meituan Select. And that means that we remain optimistic about the long-term potential of the online grocery market in China. And we have been attracting this market with a few different models.
Meituan Select is one of the business models we are doing in online grocery, and we will stay patient. Now, at the same time, we will also stick to our financial disciplines and dynamically assess our progress and balance resource allocation among different models, and for other new initiatives, most of them have achieved better than expected efficiency improvement and maintained quite healthy growth in the first half of this year, so on a collective basis, these new initiatives have achieved a modest profit this quarter, and regarding our overseas expansion, and while we are still in a very early stage, we will continue to evaluate opportunities across different regions, and so we won't dive deep into the specifics about any specific markets until we have some concrete progress to share.
So from a financial perspective, the budget for overseas is already included in the total new initiative segment, so the impact on segment operating costs will be limited this year. And we believe overseas market is the right long-term strategy for Meituan, so we will stay patient and continue to explore while maintaining our financial discipline. That, that's it. Thank you.
Your next question comes from Charlene Liu with HSBC. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Thank you, Management, for taking my question, and congratulations on the solid set of results. I would like to ask a question about shareholder return policy. Given Meituan has already repurchased $3 billion worth of shares this year, will management consider launching an additional buyback plan? Shaohui mentioned some repurchased share has already been canceled. Are there plans to cancel all repurchased shares, or will they be used for other purposes? Additionally, will the company increase the annual ESOP grants due to the buyback? And what are management's thoughts on putting in place a more systematic and continuous shareholder return policy in the future? Thank you so much.
Thank you for the question. As we mentioned earlier, during this quarter, we repurchased over $2 billion worth of shares before [audio distortion] started. It represents more than 2.1% of our total shares outstanding. This action reflects our confidence in our current and long-term share value. Our board has approved us to cancel all the repurchased shares to further reduce our share count. We have repurchased total 3.6% of the total shares outstanding year to date. It's more than the ESOP grants from 2021 - 2023. Our average annual ESOP grants from 2021 - 2023 were approximately 1% of total shares. In the long run, we expect the average annual grants to be stabilized at a similar level or slightly lower.
Our management team focused on enhancing long-term shareholder returns, whether through our business growth or capital allocation. We will optimize our capital allocation strategy, directing resources toward high ROI investment to ensure sustained healthy growth of our business and significantly increase free cash flow. We target to offset the dilutive effect of ESOP grants in each year through share buyback. We will also take into consideration our investment plans, cash flow, our offshore cash reserves, debt repayment and share price, et cetera, to decide whether to authorize buyback plans as needed. Based on our current offshore cash reserves and our understanding on the market, our board has just approved another $1 billion buyback plan, and this further reflect our confidence in our business development and long-term share value. We will maintain a flexible strategy and execution of future buybacks. Thank you.
Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I'll now hand back to Ms. Scarlett Xu for closing remarks.
Okay, thank you for joining our call. We look forward to speaking with everyone next quarter. Thank you for your support.
That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.