On April 2, 2018, Alibaba Group, Ant Financial and Ele.me jointly announced that Alibaba has signed an acquisition agreement to complete a wholly-owned acquisition of Ele.me with Ant Financial for US$9.5 billion. 
Up to now, it has been more than 5 years since the acquisition, and Ele.me has already deeply integrated with Alibaba's business and become an important part of Alibaba's local services. But there are also rumors that "Douyin is talking with Ali about the acquisition of Ele.me, with a valuation of about $7 billion, but for this news, Douyin said that there is no such plan, and Ele.me said that the two sides have been cooperating, but the so-called "acquisition" is complete nonsense. 
As the second largest food delivery platform in China, Ele.me also has a huge terminal delivery population, which bears the core burden of Alibaba's local life sector, and together with AutoNavi and Fliggy, it forms Alibaba's layout in the local life sector. So did Ali earn this money back?Judging from Alibaba's financial report, the revenue of local life services in the third quarter was 155600 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 16%, the loss is also continuing to decrease, the order volume and unit price of Ele.me have increased, and the development momentum is going up. 
For Alibaba, the primary purpose of acquiring Ele.me is to make up for its own shortcomings in new retail and local retail, form a strategic position and form a linkage with its word-of-mouth, Fliggy, AutoNavi map and other businesses, and lay out the last 1 km of the local market, like Meituan's local business core revenue has reached a total of 576.9 billion yuan, as a trillion-level market, Ali will definitely not give up. Moreover, the rumored ** is only 7 billion US dollars, which is equivalent to 5 years after Ali bought back, and the valuation of Ele.me has shrunk by 2.5 billion US dollars, and Ali loses an average of 500 million US dollars per year, that is, more than 3 billion yuan, which is not counting the money that Ele.me has been losing, and the valuation is also a little low from the perspective of investment returns. What do you think?