Posing as Meituan shared power banks has unexpectedly become a lucrative business.

The chaos in the shared power bank industry was exposed by Chapingjun several times years ago, so there should be nothing more to discuss theoretically.

But we never expected that some industries are just so restless, and their absurdity level keeps escalating every once in a while...

Let's take a look at the picture below first.

The striking Meituan Charging logo is at the bottom of this picture, and the entire device from the cabinet to the power bank is in the iconic Meituan yellow, so is this just a Meituan charging cabinet?

No.

Take a closer look, there is a counterfeit device hidden between two genuine ones, wearing the same appearance and playing cosplay tricks...

This has led to a large number of mistaken returns.

Look, someone took a photo to record after returning the power bank by mistake, four out of six slots in a six-port cabinet have received incorrectly returned power banks.

After the wrong return, your power bank will be stuck in the counterfeit cabinet and you cannot take it out, you can only watch yourself being continuously charged fees.

You can either admit the loss directly, pay 99 yuan or 149 yuan to buy out the power bank and end up suffering a huge loss, or enter a side quest to learn all kinds of tricks from Xiaohongshu, and start a rescue operation to get your power bank back.

How many people have been scammed already?

These yellow-disguised counterfeit power banks have long been everywhere in the market.

Shangdian, Aoteman, Dianxiaote, Xiudian, Wukong Fast Charge, Dianbaobao, Super Fast Charge, Zhicong Fast Charge, Judianbao, Duxiangchong, Jubaochong, Chuanduo.

A post titled "What to do if your power bank gets stuck after returning it to the wrong cabinet?" has received more than 10,000 likes and hundreds of heated comments. People troubled by this problem have developed all kinds of solutions, using screwdrivers, straws, sticky hooks, milk tea cup sleeves, credit cards and so on.

Some people accuse these unbranded products of deliberately copying Meituan's design to mislead the public.

Others firmly believe Meituan is fully aware of the situation: "You don't get it. If you pay to buy the power bank, Meituan benefits from it, so it turns a blind eye to these counterfeit products, otherwise it would have sued all the copycats long ago."

Out of curiosity, Chapingjun decided to dig into the truth.

I found the situation is far more complicated than I thought. After the market demand becomes highly mature, the shared power bank industry is trapped in an extremely distorted stock competition war.

Who is

Mass producing these yellow cabinets

Someone in an agent exchange group summed it up: "Now only Jiedian and Starmarker don't have yellow cabinets, right?"

Different from the early days when most shared power bank cabinets were white, yellow cabinets have become the absolute mainstream now, only a few brands still stick to white cabinets.

But this insistence is meaningless, because white cabinets can be repainted into yellow easily.

Starmarker cabinet sprayed into yellow

Yellow is not just a color, it is a "magic spell".

Those unbranded power banks with low market awareness and little marketing budget can quickly expand their user base after changing their color to look highly similar to Meituan's products.

It's a bit like the impersonator who looks exactly like Jay Chou and makes a living by cashing in on the celebrity lookalike effect.

The first stage where this magic works is when agents negotiate to enter physical stores.

Since power banks are being iterated and upgraded, the old Meituan models don't have super fast charge labels, so these agents will teach you: "When you go in to negotiate entry, just say you are bringing a new fast-charge version to upgrade the store's old devices, most store owners will agree to let you place the cabinets."

In fact, they not only taught Chapingjun to free-ride on Meituan's reputation, but also to free-ride on Douyin: "If all the local cabinets have been changed to super fast-charge, you can say you are a brand under Douyin. If the store owner asks for details, you can say you are a Douyin cooperative brand that can provide free promotion for the store."

More importantly, yellow cabinets can snatch revenue flow.

Whether in industry groups where shared power bank agents gather, or in casual conversations with agents, yellow is always a core keyword that comes up constantly.

A senior veteran of unbranded power banks called Cheng Ge shared his revenue snatching story with Chapingjun: "Before, Starmarker had a store in our region that generated more than 700 yuan of revenue per month. After Meituan entered, the revenue dropped to only 100 yuan. I'm not bragging, I can grab 400 yuan of revenue a month just by placing my yellow cabinet next to Meituan's, and take half of the total revenue."

"White cabinets can't generate much revenue. All those brands like Beidian have changed their cabinets to yellow now, but I think it's too late for them. They didn't even change their product stickers. Now the only options are to add new unbranded lines, or do Meituan's agency business."

"Why place your cabinet far away from Meituan's? Just put your cabinet on top of Meituan's cabinet, you will drain all its revenue. How much does Meituan hate me? Almost all my devices are placed above Meituan's. Later when they can't beat me, they negotiated with me to place our cabinets side by side, then we can split the revenue 50/50."

Conquering the market vs. maintaining the market

Location is the most important factor for buying a house, and it is also the core factor for shared power bank business.

Locations with large passenger flow and long user staying time such as restaurants, airports and bars are high-quality spots where shared power banks are rigid in demand. For locations with small passenger flow or where users do not stay for long, there is naturally no demand for renting power banks.

High-quality spots are limited in total quantity.

When the whole market cake stops growing, all players can only grab the share from each other's plates.

In 2020, the shared power bank market was still dominated by Jiedian, Xiaodian and Starmarker, most of the businesses were direct sales operated. At that time, Meituan restarted its shared power bank business for the third time.

Meituan seemed to be fully determined and took two major moves.

First, it exchanged higher ranking on its app for its own shared power bank to enter stores. This method of using traffic entrance to exchange for spot locations is a dimensionality reduction strike to other players. Second, it gradually abandoned self-operated spots, adopted a large number of agent models to quickly spread its devices across the market.

Starting from the second half of 2023, Meituan surpassed other players, the revenue of direct sales teams of brands like Starmarker and Xiaodian dropped sharply.

Youpomiao Mian, who used to work for a top 3 shared power bank brand, told Chapingjun: "The revenue data dropped visibly. The total revenue in Xi'an was 90 million yuan in 2022, which halved to 40-50 million yuan in 2023, and only about 20 million yuan was left in the second half of 2024."

Also in 2024, a top Meituan agent called Brother C in the Jiangsu-Zhejiang-Shanghai region found that "counterfeit yellow" cabinets started to be stacked on top of his Meituan cabinets. At first the situation was not serious, but after only 1 year, the "counterfeit yellow" trend broke out completely.

Logically speaking, as Meituan's brand effect gets stronger, more agents should choose to cooperate with the leading brand. But why are there more and more unbranded counterfeit products instead?

The reason is not hard to understand.

When brands are expanding the market, they need a large number of agents to help place devices and grab spots, so their policies are usually very loose. But after the market is fully validated and the agent system becomes large-scale, the platform will inevitably start to regulate and reorganize the agent team, shifting from the market expansion stage to the market maintenance stage.

From the perspective of agents, this means: The entry threshold is getting higher and higher.

To do this business, the first step is to purchase shared power bank cabinets. Small agents usually buy dozens to hundreds of units.

Take Meituan as an example, the minimum order is 10 units. The price of a 6-port cabinet is 1050 yuan per unit, and an 8-port cabinet costs 1430 yuan per unit. If you buy 3000 units at one time, the 6-port cabinet still costs 670 yuan per unit, 8-port cabinet costs 860 yuan per unit. The down payment is 50%, so the down payment for 10 6-port devices is about 5000 yuan.

This really requires a certain amount of financial strength...

While the price of second-tier brands and unbranded products is mostly in the 400-600 yuan range, and they generally support installment payment, the down payment can be as low as 150 yuan per unit, so the down payment for 10 6-port devices is only around 1500 yuan.

There is another layer of game.

Brands that are in the market maintenance stage will use a more complete assessment system to manage agents, and fines are a common operation.

An agent of Jiedian called Brother T told me that after he upgraded his new power banks, he would be deducted 0.5 yuan per power bank per day in the cabinet. It doesn't seem like much, but many spots of shared power banks have very low daily revenue, after adding this new fixed cost, some spots may even run at a loss.

Of course, you can also buy out the power banks directly, but he calculated that the buyout fee (59 yuan per unit) multiplied by the number of power banks he has means he needs to pay another 90,000 yuan.

Some other agents complained: "If a power bank is offline for more than 30 days, you will be fined 70 yuan per unit. Meituan, Starmarker and Xiaodian all have this kind of dormant fine policy."

While brands that are still in the market expansion stage usually promise guaranteed revenue share and incentive policies to attract agents, offering all kinds of reward plans to recruit more people and expand their device network.

If you are a small business owner with little capital, which choice will you make?

For many people, instead of paying higher cost to join leading brands and struggle in a saturated market, it is better to buy