Kuaishou Suhua stepped down as CEO and acted as a scapegoat for sluggish performance! Rumors are always against the majority shareholders

The two co-founders of Kuaishou adjusted the division of labor.

On the evening of October 29, Kuaishou-W (01024.HK) announced that the board of directors had agreed to the resignation of the company's co-founder Su Hua as CEO and had approved co-founder Cheng Yixiao to serve in the position, effective October 29, 2021.

The announcement also shows that Su Hua will continue to serve as chairman, executive director and member of the remuneration committee, responsible for formulating the company's long-term strategy. As CEO, Cheng Yixiao will be responsible for the daily operation and business development of the company, and report to Chairman Su Hua.

Previously, Huang Zheng, founder of Pinduoduo, and Zhang Yiming, CEO of ByteDance, also stepped down as CEOs.

It is understood that the current Kuaishou is merged from the entrepreneurial team of Suhua and Cheng Yixiao in 2013, Suhua is mainly responsible for investment and financing, overseas, GRPR, administrative personnel finance and external businesses, and Cheng Yixiao is responsible for products, operations, e-commerce, games and other departments.

According to the Beijing News, the reason for the adjustment may be that the major shareholders of Kuaishou are dissatisfied with the new number of users after the listing. "The main reason is that shareholders are not satisfied with Kuaishou's data on user growth in the past two years, and are more inclined to try to do community operations," said a secondary market analyst. The two departing middle managers of Kuaishou said that the average daily life of the Kuaishou app exceeded 300 million after sponsoring the Spring Festival Gala, but then it has been fluctuating around 300 million, and there has been no significant growth, which has become the anxiety of the senior management of Kuaishou.

On February 5 this year, Kuaishou, which bears the title of "short video first share", officially landed on the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Since then, the change has opened the architectural adjustment and optimization.

The restructuring is also a distinction between the roles of chairman and chief executive officer in accordance with the relevant provisions of the Rules Governing the Listing of Securities of Hong Kong United Exchange Limited. With the change of management role, Suhua will focus more on the overall strategic planning and development of the company, and will have more time and energy to invest in the exploration of new directions; Cheng Yixiao will focus on the company's overall business and operation management, which is expected to further improve the efficiency and management efficiency of Kuaishou organization.

The "myth of making riches" in Kuaishou, which is the peak of listing, has long dissipated, closing at HK$103.50/share on October 29, down 75.23% from HK$417.8/share in the early stage of listing.

Kuaishou's Q2 revenue in fiscal 2021 was 19.14 billion yuan, an increase of 48.8% year-on-year, and the operating loss was 7.215 billion yuan, an increase of 184.1% year-on-year; the adjusted net loss was 4.77 billion yuan, an increase of 146.2% year-on-year.

According to the financial report, Kuaishou's average daily active users in Q2 of 2021 were 293 million and the average monthly active users were 506 million, compared with 295 million and 519.8 million of average monthly active users in Q1 this year. At the same time, sales and marketing expenses in Q2 2021 reached 11.27 billion yuan, an increase of 100.89% compared with 5.61 billion yuan in the same period last year.

Cheng Yi smiled and said: "In the second quarter, the DAU (daily active) had a fluctuation of less than one point, and this fluctuation was within the normal range. In the three months of April, May and June, DAU has been accelerating, with a year-on-year increase of nearly 14% in June. After the second quarter, this accelerating growth trend continues, and the monthly growth rate of year-on-year and quarter-on-month continues to increase. So we remain confident in our annual growth target, as well as our medium-term target of 400 million DAU. ”

According to Tiger Sniff, history proves that Su Hua is not a "very obedient" person, and Tencent, as the majority shareholder of Kuaishou, should reasonably say that Su Hua should "give up three points", but this is not the case. For example, last year, the Internet had rumors of Kuaishou's acquisition of Sogou, and Sogou was Tencent's coveted cake for many years; for example, there were previous media reports that Kuaishou refused to merge the game live broadcasting business with Huya Douyu, and Tencent had vigorously promoted the merger of Huya Douyu, although it has now failed, but its ambition to unify the game live broadcast has long been known.

Moreover, whether it is the acquisition of A station, the launch of the Kuaishou live broadcast PC platform, or the strategic measures such as going to sea and chasing 300 million daily live, most of the results are not satisfactory today, and now Kuaishou is the most questioned investment and financing, overseas, and company management are the main aspects of Suhua. Therefore, if you have to find someone to take responsibility for Kuaishou's current predicament, the CEO Su Hua who is pushed to the front of the stage is obviously more responsible.

On the other hand, Cheng Yixiao, in the past few years of fast-handed singing and soaring has been "invisible" behind the scenes, his personality is similar to Zhang Xiaolong's bad words, but he is full of product manager characteristics. Under the aggressive offensive of Douyin in the past two years, its responsible product operations, e-commerce, etc. have bitten the second position, ensuring the stability of the kuaishou basic disk, reflecting a strong "product resilience" and tenacious competitiveness, and even in the eyes of many people, "because everyone overestimates douyin, it greatly underestimates the far-reaching impact of Kuaishou's product on the entire Chinese Internet." ”

Moreover, Kuaishou's "old iron" basic disk mainly benefits from the double-column product design and traffic distribution method, the product is largely affected by the will of Cheng Yixiao, and he himself adheres to the "inclusive distribution", the product adheres to the concept of focusing on ordinary users, and has been deeply rooted in the DNA of Kuaishou's product.

In addition, before Kuaishou adjusted the CEO, some insiders said that Kuaishou's investor relations department was recently conveying the signal that "Q3 quarter, the company's user data and revenue data are good", which is a very intriguing time node.

Therefore, the major shareholders finally stood on the side of Cheng Yi, perhaps hoping that after this organizational structure adjustment, it can bring some positive changes to promote the next development of Kuaishou, but the more far-reaching impact is that Kuaishou is repairing the company's management dilemma from top to bottom through drastic organizational restructuring.