E-commerce platform Meituan&Dazhongdianping finished the world's largest online-to-offline (O2O) fundraising campaign, the company announced on January 19.

The company's first round of financing raised a record sum of over $3.3 billion, making the company worth over $18 billion, according to Wang Xing, CEO of Meituan&Dazhongdianping, a new company formed by group-buying platform meituan.com and review service provider dazhongdianping.com.

"The financing support will encourage us to explore the untapped consumption potential of Chinese consumers more and offer a better, more convenient user experience," Wang said.

The service sector is playing an increasingly important role in China's economic growth, official data showed on January 19, with the service sector accounting for more than half of GDP for the first time ever.

End-user consumption, including resident and government spending, contributed 66.4 percent to national GDP growth in 2015, up 15.4 percentage points from 2014, the official data showed.

China's O2O market is gaining steam thanks to policy support from the government to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship, and daily consumption e-commerce platforms can now play a positive role in offering new supplies and catering to growing demands, Wang added.

The company offers wide-ranging O2O services from takeaway to movie tickets, with daily order topping 10 million and annual transactions exceeding 170 billion yuan ($25.84 billion) in 2015.

(Xinhua News Agency January 19, 2016)