BEIJING - Chinese online-to-offline (O2O) giant Meituan & Dazhongdianping has announced it will set up a college to train e-commerce personnel.

The college, named Internet Plus University (IPU), is the first of its kind in the e-commerce sector to focus on developing business models, technology and skills to promote China's "Internet Plus" strategy.

It will integrate the company's training departments to establish several schools to train internal staff and business partners on upgrading e-commerce, the company announced Saturday evening.

E-commerce platforms should not only focus on marketing and transactions, but also expand to other upstream services, according to Wang Xing, CEO of the company, noting that the essence of China's "Internet Plus" strategy is improving efficiency and reducing costs across all sectors by integrating the Internet with more industries.

Formed by the merger of group-buying platform meituan.com and review service dazhongdianping.com in October 2015, Meituan & Dazhongdianping offers a range of O2O services, from food delivery to movie tickets.

The company has established partnerships with about 4.32 million vendors. Including their separate pre-merger customer counts, the company boasted about 220 million active customers in the last 12 months, with about 180 million using its mobile app to order services, according to an early statement.

China's online retail volume reached 2.24 trillion yuan ($335.3 billion) in the first half of 2016, up 28.2 percent year on year, data of the National Bureau of Statistics showed.