62-year-old Yu Minhong was busy apologizing, and 31-year-old Dong Yuhui was at the peak of his life

Zinc Finance

2024-04-08 18:41Posted on the official account of Zhejiang Zinc Finance

Author: Chen Yan

Edited by Gale

Yu Minhong, a generation of entrepreneurs, is in his sixties, and has apologized for patronizing people in the past six months. Recently, Yu Minhong posted on Douyin in response to his stealing the limelight from Dong Yuhui, "Actually, I never had a plan to go to Henan for live broadcast", because the work of New Oriental is not in place, which has caused everyone's misunderstanding, and I apologize for this.

The screenshot of Yu Minhong's Douyin account is actually more than this time, since the small composition incident last year, Yu Minhong seems to have started the three-in-a-row mode of apology. After apologizing to Dong Yuhui, he apologized to Dong Yuhui's fans. apologize for internal management, apologize for the fermentation of public opinion, and even apologize for blocking netizens. The frequent apologies also reflect that Yu Minhong has become incapable of the current internal management of the enterprise and the handling of core employee relationships. Times have changed, the old and new business models of enterprise operation are alternate, and Yu Minhong, who made a fortune as a traditional enterprise, has long passed his heyday. On the other hand, Dong Yuhui has been upgraded from a worker in the live broadcast room to a senior partner selected by Dongfang. When people reach the age of 30, they gain fame and fortune and usher in the highlight moment of their lives. For this reason, Yu Minhong can only say: "When relying on employees with huge capabilities to build a business model and develop, the boss is working for employees." But compared with being willing to work for Dong Yuhui, to a greater extent, what Yu Minhong is facing is that the tide of the times is rolling forward, but he has no choice but to let the flowers fall. The compromise is Yu Minhong's, and the excitement is Dong Yuhui's right now, Yu Minhong has to lower his posture in the face of Dong Yuhui. Speaking of this Henan live broadcast incident, the reason is that in March this year, Dong Yuhui once said to the public that after the end of the trip to Hubei with Hui, he would go to Henan at the end of April, and the investment promotion activities have also begun. But some time ago, Henan Cultural Tourism officially announced Yu Minhong's notice, saying that it planned to visit Zhengzhou, Luoyang and Anyang between April 1 and April 3. The two of them were too close to each other, which caused a wave of netizens to question that Yu Minhong went to Henan for live broadcast in advance, didn't he want to steal Dong Yuhui's limelight. Although Yu Minhong finally clarified the oolong, Henan Cultural Tourism also deleted Yu Minhong's video. Yu Minhong also ordered Henan New Oriental Cultural Tourism to completely stop live broadcasting and conduct self-rectification and reflection. Dong Yuhui also came forward to help explain, "The communication between me and Mr. Yu has been very smooth", thank you for your understanding.

Dong Yuhui replied

But looking back at the whole thing, it can be found that the smooth resolution of the matter depends on Yu Minhong's timely compromise.

In fact, Yu Minhong, as the founder of Oriental Selection, cultural tourism is a new business that the group focuses on, even if he really goes to Henan for live broadcast, there is no problem with reason. Yu Minhong's explanation gave people a feeling that he really shouldn't go and had to give way to Dong Yuhui. The reason is that, unlike the traditional educational institutions of the new Oriental way, Dongfang Selection is a company that is fully exposed to the public and has relatively transparent information, its main battlefield is in the live broadcast room, the core weapon is the anchor with large traffic, and a large number of netizens are potential parents. In this case, the power relationship between the boss Yu Minhong and the employee Dong Yuhui has changed, and Dong Yuhui is the most important "selling point", so Yu Minhong must hide behind it. It can be seen that in the previous small essay incident, Yu Minhong also took a similar action. At that time, Dong Yuhui was angry, so he directly asked for leave and returned to his hometown, and temporarily canceled the live broadcast of Jilin Trip. Sun Dongxu, who was the CEO of Dongfang Selection at the time, added fuel to the fire, dropped his mobile phone in the live broadcast to "have a meeting" with netizens, and also told Dong Yuhui's salary thoroughly, saying that the company did not owe him, and the annual salary was not more than the tens of millions reported on the Internet. As soon as this happened, the contradiction between Dong Yuhui and Sun Dongxu came to the table, forcing Yu Minhong to choose one of the two. On December 16, Yu Minhong invited Dong Yuhui back to the live broadcast room, and explained as soon as he came up, "Yuhui has never told anyone that he is not selected in the East", giving everyone a reassurance. During the whole process, Yu Minhong did not have any leadership posture, and poured tea and water for Dong Yuhui from time to time, looking very sincere, which gave Dong Yuhui enough face. He even said frankly: "Everyone says that Yuhui is fooled, I told Yuhui, if you feel fooled, you can leave at any time from now on." Yu Minhong promoted Dong Yuhui and arranged his own studio and live broadcast room for him. Let Dong Yuhui stand on a bigger stage and let Sun Dongxu step down and be invisible, this is the final result.

Sun Dongxu apologized for his behavior in the live broadcast room

To a greater extent, Yu Minhong's various compromises are based on consideration of the overall interests of the enterprise. After all, Dong Yuhui is very important to the current selection of the East.

Dong Yuhui's every move may affect the stock price of Dongfang Selection, which fell by nearly 22% in a single week during the small composition incident. The sales of "Walking with Hui" in the first month of broadcasting can account for more than 15% of the GMV of Dongfang Selection in the first half of the year.

Flowers, applause, halos, flows...... Yu Minhong, who is in his 60s, has witnessed the success of 30-year-old Dong Yuhui. Yu Minhong, who was also the big winner of the times, has also been as beautiful as Dong Yuhui. At the end of the 80s of the 20th century, the trend of studying abroad rose, and in just four years, the number of self-funded students in China soared from more than 1,000 in 1983 to more than 100,000. At that time, Yu Minhong had just graduated from Peking University and wanted to study abroad like his classmates, but the problem was money. Yu Minhong teaches at Peking University, and his salary is 200 yuan a month, which is only about 30 US dollars when converted into US dollars. According to his salary at the time, if he wanted to save enough for the tuition fee to study in the United States for 4 years, he had to save 222 years without eating or drinking. So he found a way to make quick money, secretly running tutoring classes outside the school, and the more students who studied abroad, the more he earned, and he could earn 2,000 yuan a month, which was 10 times his salary. At that time, it happened to be a golden age of entrepreneurship, and under the advocacy of the policy, the post-50s and post-60s generations became the first people to go to the sea to eat crabs under the wave of reform. Yu Minhong was punished by Peking University for running a school privately, and later simply resigned from his teaching position and joined the wave of entrepreneurship.

Yu Minhong's early teaching photos

In 1993, 31-year-old Yu Minhong officially founded New Oriental English School. But unlike the logic of operating Oriental selection, Yu Minhong has always been the absolute authority within New Oriental.

As an education and training institution that has eaten the dividends of the early era, it is almost a must for New Oriental to be invincible in the fierce market competition, rapidly expand its scale and eat up its market share. In such a stage of expansion, Yu Minhong also needs to take an iron and bloody hand, so that everyone can listen to his orders and work hard in one place. Yu Minhong once said: "When you find that you can't control a little bit with those top talents, you would rather use intermediate talents." Think about it, is your company going to live, or will it be overthrown by your top talents?" Because of this, four years after the establishment of New Oriental, when Yu Minhong thought that he could control the overall situation, he went abroad to find his old classmates Wang Qiang and Xu Xiaoping to start a business together. When disputes and contradictions arose in the future, Yu Minhong did not back down at all, and directly kicked people out.

Yu Minhong, Xu Xiaoping, and Wang Qiang are like saying that after Yu Minhong learned that Xu Xiaoping and his employees opposed his reform, he directly let people occupy Xu Xiaoping's office, and Xu Xiaoping was so angry that he couldn't speak. In 2006, when New Oriental was listed, Yu Minhong convened the board of directors to discuss the issue of Xu Xiaoping's stay, and the board of directors unanimously approved the liquidation of the latter. Under the struggle for power in the group, Xu Xiaoping and Wang Qiang left the management of New Oriental, and a group of entrepreneurial veterans such as Bao Fanyi and Hu Min also left one after another. In the end, all the power of New Oriental was in the hands of Yu Minhong alone. In retrospect, Yu Minhong's coercive tactics were indeed effective. In 2001, New Oriental Education & Technology Group was established. In 2006, New Oriental Education & Technology Group was listed on the New York Stock Exchange, becoming the first overseas listed education and training institution in Chinese mainland. After 13 years of listing, New Oriental hit a record high in market capitalization, exceeding $20 billion. With power in his left hand and wealth in his right, Yu Minhong has established his own education and training empire. The old Yu Fufang, Yu Minhong and New Oriental, who have been in the education and training industry for 28 years, stopped abruptly in 2021. That year, Yu Minhong was almost 60 years old, at this age when he should have retired, he witnessed the overthrow of his business empire overnight, the company was almost liquidated, hundreds of thousands of families were waiting for tuition refunds, 60,000 employees were waiting for resignation compensation, and the market value of New Oriental fell by more than 90% in half a year, leaving only a piece of chicken feathers.

The transformation to Oriental selection is a last resort. For a long time, Dongfang Selection did live broadcasts to bring goods, but there was no improvement, and a single pear may not be sold in a few hours. Even Yu Minhong's own live broadcast debut, at most, only 20,000 people watched it online, and in 3 hours, 4.9084 million yuan of goods were sold. As a comparison, Luo Yonghao, a former employee of New Oriental, made his debut in live broadcasting, with a total of more than 48 million viewers in more than 3 hours, and sales of 110 million yuan, setting a record for Douyin at that time. It wasn't until Dong Yuhui became famous in one fell swoop that the crisis of Oriental Selection was temporarily lifted. But the word "temporary" is already a hidden crisis. Although Yu Minhong and Dongfang Selection did not want Dong Yuhui to become a super IP from the beginning, so as not to shake the company's operation. The previous operations also wanted to gradually "de-Dong Yuhui" and find a harmonious relationship between big anchors and live broadcast institutions. But the results also saw that "de-Dong Yuhui" could not be achieved, but was eaten by traffic. Yu Minhong could only come forward again and again, apologize to everyone, and try to calm the anger. In 2024, the 31-year-old Dong Yuhui's personal career will take a step further, he is not only a head anchor, but also a smash hit star intellectual. During the recent trip to Hubei, dozens of security guards held hands and formed a circle to protect Dong Yuhui, who was chatting and laughing all the way. This time it was criticized by netizens for being too pompous.

Dong Yuhui traveled to Hubei

In 2024, 62-year-old Yu Minhong will be past retirement age. When he went to Xiangshan before, the access control reminded him that the elderly did not need to buy tickets, "and it made me really sad for a while", Yu Minhong said in the old Yu's gossip.

Times never stop, but Yu Minhong is not ready to retire.

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