Lai Meisong

Lai Meisong is the founder, chairman, and CEO of ZTO Express (Cayman) Inc., China's largest express delivery company by parcel volume and the world's busiest delivery network. Born in 1970 in Zhejiang Province — the heartland of China's private express delivery industry — Lai started with almost nothing: a single truck route between Shanghai and Hangzhou in 2002, sleeping in warehouses and personally loading packages. Lai's strategic genius was the network-partner (franchise) model. Unlike SF Express, which owns its entire delivery chain, ZTO uses a hub-and-spoke system where ZTO owns and operates the central sorting hubs and long-haul transportation (trucks, rail, air), while independent franchise partners handle pickup and delivery at the local level. This model allowed ZTO to scale explosively — from serving a few cities to covering virtually every address in China — with far less capital than a fully owned network. ZTO now operates over 100 sorting centers and a fleet of thousands of trucks and dedicated cargo aircraft. The numbers are staggering: ZTO processes over 30 billion parcels per year, approximately one-quarter of all express deliveries in China. For context, this volume exceeds FedEx, UPS, and DHL's combined global parcel volumes. The Chinese express delivery market is the world's most competitive, with five major players (ZTO, YTO, STO, Yunda, and J&T) competing fiercely on price, speed, and service quality. Margins are razor-thin — the average delivery fee is under 3 RMB — and only the most operationally efficient operators survive. Lai's key decisions include pricing strategy in the ongoing price war, automation investment (ZTO has been rapidly automating sorting operations to reduce labor costs), fleet expansion and route optimization, international expansion (particularly cross-border e-commerce logistics), and the balance between market share growth and profitability. ZTO's performance is closely tied to the health of Chinese e-commerce, as approximately 80% of express parcels originate from online shopping platforms including Alibaba, JD.com, and Pinduoduo.