Meituan flies 20 km with a winch at home and exports half the machine

Meituan runs the largest food-delivery drone fleet in the world, and it sells abroad under a separate brand: Keeta Drone, which operates in Dubai and Hong Kong. Its technology page lists exactly one aircraft, the Keeta Drone Gen 4: 7.2 kg empty, 2.4 kg of payload, 10 km of range, 10 m/s cruise. That is the standard model. In China the same fourth generation has a second member, the M-Drone 4L Winch, and the gap between them is not a detail. The winch version carries 4.5 kg instead of 2.4, flies up to 20 km fully loaded instead of 10, and lowers the parcel on a cable from a hover, so it does not need a prepared landing cabinet at the other end. Its stated weather envelope is heavy rain, moderate snow and Beaufort 6 wind, down to -20 °C. None of that is on offer to an export customer today. A partner signing up in the Gulf gets an aircraft with roughly half the payload and half the range of the strongest machine in the manufacturer's own fourth generation, and one that still depends on a fixed pick-up cabinet at the delivery end. There are unglamorous reasons why this can be so. A winch that pays out a cable over a street is a harder case for a regulator than a drone that lands inside a locked box on a rooftop, and export approvals are usually granted for one configuration at a time. Cold-weather figures also matter little in a country where the problem is 50 °C, not -20 °C. Still, the practical conclusion is worth stating plainly: the numbers quoted in coverage of Meituan's Chinese operations do not describe the aircraft on sale outside China. Anyone comparing drone delivery services should check which of the two is actually flying overhead.