Takeout Market "Three-Way Battle": Thin-Wall Injection Molding Rides the Wind to Rise

In 2025, China's food delivery market sees fierce competition among the three major platforms—JD.com, Meituan, and Ele.me—centered on market share, user subsidies, and rider rights. Price wars, subsidy battles, and service competitions are taking place one after another. After several consecutive months of intense rivalry, China's food delivery market is experiencing explosive growth.

Data Source: Publicly available social information

Currently, China's food delivery market is demonstrating robust growth momentum and vast market prospects. By 2024, the number of online food delivery users in China has reached 592 million, with a usage rate rising to 53.40%. The market size of China's food delivery industry has reached 1.5 trillion yuan. In February 2025, a significant change occurred in the industry as the e-commerce giant JD.com officially announced its entry into the food delivery market. By June, the total number of orders from the three major platforms—Meituan, Ele.me, and JD.com—exceeded 250 million orders per day, expanding over two times compared to before the competition. The rapid development of the food delivery market has led to a swift increase in the demand for thin-wall injection molding of polypropylene meal box materials and milk tea cup materials.

Data Source: JLC Network Technology

Polypropylene, as a demand-oriented product, has seen its thin-walled injection molding production rapidly increase, driven by market demand. As shown in the figure, the compound growth rate of thin-walled injection molding supply reached as high as 22% from 2020 to 2022, quickly rising from 1.16 million tons in 2020 to 2.1 million tons. After 2022, as the food delivery market entered a stable phase, the production of thin-walled injection molding products remained at a high level, fluctuating. Since 2025, the food delivery market has entered another explosive growth phase, with thin-walled injection molding production reaching 1.17 million tons in the first half of the year. It is expected that the annual production of thin-walled injection molding will exceed 2.3 million tons, with a double-digit growth rate within the year.

Data source: Jinlianchuang

Supported by strong demand and a phase of tightened supply, the thin-wall injection molding market has performed impressively. In July, the domestic polypropylene market as a whole showed a fluctuating downward trend. Although there was a slight rebound at the end of the month driven by "anti-involution" market sentiment, trading in the general-purpose material market remained weak. In contrast, thin-wall injection molding demonstrated strong resistance to price declines. On one hand, there was robust rigid demand for summer items such as high-temperature milk tea cups and lunch boxes. Additionally, the "business war" among food delivery platforms generated more orders, further boosting the summer thin-wall injection molding market. On the other hand, during this period, maintenance shutdowns at Yuheng Energy Phase I and Hengli Petrochemical’s STPP units led to reduced domestic supply of thin-wall injection molding materials. This short-term supply-demand mismatch supported the high prices in the thin-wall injection molding market. As of July 29, mainstream domestic raffia prices were at 7,000-7,200 yuan/ton, while mainstream thin-wall injection molding prices were at 7,300-7,450 yuan/ton, with the price spread maintaining around 350 yuan/ton.