Miutrip, a travel management company (TMC) specializes in providing integrated solutions for business travel, announced it has received multi-million investments in its A Round financing. The investors include Oriental Fortune Capital, Broad Resources and Incapital, and the financial advisor is Zuoyu Capital.
Business travel management in China is a relatively blank canvas, though China’s business travel market is anticipated by research organizations such as Global Business Travel Association to usurp the USA to have the world’s highest business travel expenditure by 2016.
At present, some 90% of companies use small to medium tour operators to process the simplest business travel bookings. As the zero-commission era is imminent, these tour operators will face major challenges in business travel management, what with having to make payments in advance on behalf of corporate clients and invest in internet technology, on top of the difficulties in integrating the full lineup of products. They may find it difficult to have a slice of the delicious pie.
Miutrip’s proprietary business travel cloud platform offers a one-stop integrated travel management solution to resolve these TMCs’ issues of networking, product integration and the burden of making advance payments.
“In the smokeless war zone for startups, it looks like we don’t have the luxury to talk ideology but should knuckle down for some elbow grease. However, as a passive upstart, I do have a sense of mission that keeps me going till now, and that is to lift the standard of China’s business travel management,” said Miutrip’s founder and CEO Haibin Zhang.
“I think only a company with a mission can go far and wide. We believe in professional division of labor, and let the professionals do their jobs. We also believe in and recognize that TMCs have their value and purpose in China’s corporate travel management business. That’s why we endeavor to be the best solution provider in the TMC sector. We hope to deliver on our mission hand in hand with TMCs. We are far from the finish line, but our team will continue to tread carefully and run with the ball,” he said.
Weidong Hu, founder of Zuoyu, the transaction’s exclusive financial advisor, said China’s small and medium business travel management is a “blue ocean” market with tremendous potential waiting to be explored. He said Miutrip aspires to be the Alibaba of the business travel management field in China. Through its cloud platform built with two-level SaaS, it aims to help the numerous small and medium TMCs resolve the issues of weak procuring power, low tech, advance payment burden, low operational capability and low brand recognition, and provides them with the tools to become informationize, standardize and improve efficiency.
Miutrip will apply the latest funding into consolidating its position in the market through marketing activities such as “Business Travel in China”. It also aims to expand and take root in the lower tier cities, and upgrade the technology for its cloud platform, as well as researching on big data. It plans to increase its offices to China to about 30 within the year in order to have a presence in every region of China. It will also offer credits of hundreds of millions yuan as leverage to help TMCs go for business travel markets worth thousands of times more. (Translation by Shuk)
