(Bloomberg) -- Simon Miao, a Hong Kong resident, signed up for a food-delivery subscription with Deliveroo during the pandemic, but he later canceled it because the monthly fee, which tops out at HK$98 ($12.61), didn’t bring many perks.

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Now he’s hooked on a rival service called Keeta from the Chinese delivery giant Meituan. It offered broader restaurant options, generous discounts and free delivery when the platform was first launched. He said he won’t use anything else.

This week, Deliveroo said it was losing too much money in Hong Kong and called it quits after a decade of operating in the city. The retreat marks the first casualty of Keeta’s aggressive pricing tactics, subsidized by parent Meituan, which has a market value of about $130 billion.

As the Chinese super app expands further afield, it’s deploying similar tactics in other new markets. The company launched in Saudi Arabia last September and has been attacking the market through similar measures. It reached one million weekly active users in January, according to Sensor Tower data, matching Delivery Hero’s Hungerstation.

Keeta Drones, a subsidiary of Meituan, received an operation license in the United Arab Emirates late last year, and the Chinese company’s ambition goes far beyond the two largest economies in the Gulf.

According to Chinese media outlet LatePost, Keeta plans to expand to Qatar, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain in the next three years. The company plans to build its overseas presence into a hundred-billion dollar business, the news site said, citing people familiar with the plans who it didn’t name. To vie for market share in Saudi Arabia, the company has set no upper limit on investment.

A representative for Meituan declined to comment.

Meituan, founded in 2010, initially built a business model with discount offerings like Groupon. In 2013, the company expanded into food delivery, and has since grown into the largest player anywhere. It clocked a gross transaction value of €136 billion ($148 billion) last year, almost double that of Uber Eats’s (€71 billion) and Doordash’s (€74 billion), according to a Bloomberg Intelligence report.

Keeta’s ambition points to a wider woe in the food delivery industry: after years of growth-at-all-cost expansion during the Covid-19 pandemic, fueled by cheap interest rates, investors are asking companies to turn a profit. But price wars spurred on by rivals with deeper pockets has made it difficult for smaller players to fight back. Last month, after years of sluggish sales, Just Eat Takeaway.com NV struck a deal to sell itself to Prosus NV for €4.1 billion.