On February 17, according to relevant media reports, sports technology company Keep recently underwent a round of large-scale organizational restructuring, or in response to the listing. In response, Keep said that in the 7 years of the company's growth, it will make at least one similar structural adjustment every year.
Split the Content Hub
It is understood that in this structural adjustment, the RDC (Sports Content Center) was split, the content and operation were assigned to the online platform (Keep App) for which Peng Wei was responsible, and the remaining middle office department was reported directly to Wang Ning, the founder and CEO of Keep; Liu Dong, co-founder of Keep, continued to be responsible for the consumer goods business and planned to move the business from Beijing to Hangzhou. According to the official website, Keep's consumer goods business includes sportswear, light food replacement, sports equipment, etc.
Finally, following the introduction of CPO and CFO, Keep once again introduced a CXO-level executive at the end of 2021——— CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) Li Dan, who is mainly responsible for the marketing department and reports directly to Wang Ning, and Zhao Qian, the former head of the marketing department, reports to Li Dan. Before joining Keep, Li Dan worked for Tencent, OPPO and other companies.
Whether to go public has attracted heated discussion
This structural adjustment has once again aroused people's attention about whether Keep will be listed. As early as last year, Keep was rumored to be listed many times, and at the end of the year, there was also news that it would be listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange this year. Some sources said that Keep originally sought to go public in the United States, but due to changes in the environment, the listing process was suspended.
Behind the rumored IPOs in a year, as the number one player in the field of Internet fitness, Keep's financing and commercialization road has always been the focus. Since its inception in 2019, with the rise of the national fitness boom, coupled with the epidemic-induced home fitness, cloud fitness, etc., Keep has been favored by capital, and has won 8 rounds of financing within 7 years, with a cumulative amount of 600 million US dollars. The Series F round was led by the SoftBank Vision Fund for $360 million.
In terms of commercialization, in recent years, it has successively launched intelligent hardware products such as treadmills and spinning bicycles, and has been involved in clothing, sports equipment, light food replacement and other fields, covering eating and wearing exercises. In terms of APP, personalized customized courses and live classes were launched online, and well-known coaches were introduced. Among them, the most well-known is last year to win the fitness industry super IP Pamela. In addition, Saturday Wild and other Internet celebrity sports have all settled in Keep.
Having been trying different ways of monetization, the outside world seems to have a lot of controversy about keep profitability. In terms of smart hardware, giants such as Xiaomi and Huawei have long been off the scene, and have successively purchased and built their own ecology; clothing, meal replacements, etc. have not yet been out of the circle, and have been exposed to product quality problems many times; the paid content of domestic and foreign hardware manufacturers, Keep obviously wants to borrow Pamela to manufacture Li Jiaqi in the fitness industry to provide users with high-value value-added services, but it is still unknown how much increment the Internet celebrity bloggers in the fitness industry can leverage.
Written by: Nandu reporter Huang Pei