(Yicai Global) March 31 -- Shares in Meituan Dianping, the firm behind China's app-for-everything of the same name, have surged today after the company reported its first ever year in the black.

Its stock [HKG:3690] was up 6.3 percent at HKD93.50 (USD12.06) as of 1.22 p.m.

The Beijing-based firm made CNY2.2 billion (USD310 million) in net profit last year as revenue increased by almost half to CNY97.5 billion (USD13.8 billion), according to its annual financial report published yesterday. The company forecasts a first-quarter loss this year due to Covid-19 but is unsure how the pandemic will affect its full-year performance.

Meituan-Dianping, formed from a merger between Meituan and Dianping in 2015, logged a CNY8.5 billion loss in 2018 after it acquired bike-sharing service Mobike and forayed into the ride-hailing and fresh food sectors. It began downscaling in 2019, closing five of its Xiaoxiang Fresh stores and clipping the number of Mobikes it had on the street to reduce costs.

It further cut operating expenses by getting its ride-hailing arm Meituan Dache onto tailored taxi services run by Shouqi Limousine & Chauffeur, Caocao Chuxing and Ucar in Shanghai and Nanjing.

Revenue from Meituan's food delivery services climbed 43.8 percent to CNY54.8 billion in 2019 thanks to rising numbers of new users in lower-tier cities. It also made CNY22.3 billion selling vouchers from merchants, hotels and travel businesses, a 40.6 percent rise, and generated CNY20.4 billion from new and other businesses, some 81.5 percent more than a year earlier.

The firm delivered CNY392.7 billion worth of food last year, a near 39 percent gain from 2018, and had 6.2 million active merchants at the end of the year, up 7.1 percent.

Editor: James Boynton