After the CEO change, will Kuaishou be better?

Author: Qingfeng

Editor: Liu Pengyao

Editor: Yu Mo

Kuaishou No. 1 engineer smiled and returned to the POSITION of CEO.

Everyone described the relationship between Kuaishou's founder Cheng Yixiao and professional manager Su Hua as "dual-core" management, and on October 29, this management model may change.

As a Hong Kong listed company, Kuaishou issued an announcement in the Hong Kong stock market: Su Hua, chairman and CEO of Kuaishou, resigned as CEO, and Kuaishou co-founder Cheng Yixiao took over as CEO. Su Hua will continue to serve as chairman and executive director of Kuaishou.

At this point, Cheng Yixiao, as the founder of Kuaishou, came to the front desk and was responsible for performance growth, while Su Hua, a professional manager recruited by investors in 2013, was in the position of chairman and helmed the long-term development strategy of Kuaishou.

Many people believe that as a listed company, the continuous decline in Kuaishou's stock price is the reason for CEO Yi Shuai. But Zhi Dunjun believes that the decline in stock prices is only the result, and the reason for this result may have been brewing for a long time.

Su Hua and Cheng Yi smiled at each other's honeymoon period

Cheng Yixiao has the flower name of "Tiantongyuan Zhang Xiaolong", the reason why it is called so, or because Cheng Yixiao is a person who is not good at words and concentrates on making products.

At that time, Kuaishou was still a GIF tool APP, and Cheng Yixiao led the team to complete the first version of the Kuaishou code and realized the original accumulation of the first 2 million users.

In contrast, Su Hua's experience is much richer.

He has worked as a search engine and system architect in Google China and Baidu, and has started dozens of businesses. His last venture, he developed a mobile search software called One Box, which was acquired by Alibaba In 2012.

The two people who seemed to be going smoothly actually had their own bottlenecks and troubles at that time.

Cheng Yixiao's Kuaishou fell into a situation of lack of user growth because of content distribution problems, and the money from the angel round of financing was almost spent, how to break through is a problem. As for Su Hua, who has been starting a business, it is urgent to need a new project to show its fist after the project is acquired.

In 2013, Zhang Fei, an investor in Kuaishou, saved a bureau to introduce the two to each other.

The description of the meeting between the two on the Internet is very story-like, such as "drinking dozens of bottles of beer" and "chatting until late at night", so it is not difficult to imagine what a heart-to-heart meeting.

After that, Cheng Yixiao's approach confirmed the claims on the Internet.

Cheng Yixiao's name is quite a jianghu person's style, and after meeting the "good person", he is also unambiguous, generously taking out shares and THE POSITION of CEO to Su Hua. At the time of Kuaishou's listing, Su Hua personally held 12.64%, which was higher than Cheng Yixiao's 10.023% shareholding.

The arrival of Su Hua has indeed helped Kuaishou break through the bottleneck of user growth.

In 2014, Kuaishou cut off the GIF business that started with it, and carried out a strategic upgrade, upgrading Kuaishou from video tool software to video social software, and in 7 months, it quickly increased its daily life from 1 million to 10 million.

Looking back, Zhang Fei's matching of the two is undoubtedly a successful and crucial step.

Cheng Yi smiled and was not good at words, proficient in products, and undertook the behind-the-scenes work; while Su Hua controlled investment and financing, overseas expansion and other pre-stage affairs, and the two people complemented each other's shortcomings and complemented each other.

Some people believe that the highlight of Cheng Yixiao's cooperation with Su Hua should be the day when the Hong Kong stock market was listed. But Zhi Dunjun believes that the beginning of 2018 may be a more appropriate and meaningful time node. At that time, Kuaishou daily active users officially entered the threshold of more than 100 million and became the head brother of the short video platform, while the daily active users of Douyin at that time were only 30 million.

It is said that at that time, Cheng Yixiao and Su Hua also deliberately went to the restaurant opposite the company to eat a bowl of noodles to celebrate.

Douyin has become "someone else's child"

However, the rise and growth rate of Vibrato is unexpected.

In July 2019, Douyin announced that its daily active users reached 320 million, while Kuaishou's daily active users in May of the same year were 200 million.

The first chair of the short video platform officially changed hands.

Since then, compared with douyin, and compared with the vibrato, it has become "the one with worse results", which seems to have become the fate of Kuaishou. Is success absolute or relative? Is happiness a personal feeling or a comparison? These metaphysical topics have always revolved around Kuaishou.

According to a survey data by Aurora, from March 2020 to March 2021, Kuaishou's monthly active life was maintained at 340 million to 330 million, which is undoubtedly successful. The data of Douyin in the same period increased from 590 million to 620 million. In terms of daily active activities, Kuaishou's daily active activities in the first quarter of 2021 were 295 million, and the average daily active activity in the first quarter of Douyin was 600 million. In contrast, whether from the absolute number or growth trend, Kuaishou has lost a lot to Douyin.

In addition to the difference in data, it seems increasingly difficult for Kuaishou to catch up with Douyin.

In February this year, the "Statistical Report on the Development of China's Internet Network" was released, which showed that China's short video users reached 873 million, accounting for 88.3% of the total Internet users. This means that the user growth ceiling of the short video platform is approaching, and the subsequent development of the industry has entered the stage of stock fighting, and this stage is often the most tragic.

Under the tragic situation, Douyin seems to have a greater advantage, not only has been far ahead in daily live, but also has ByteDance's global 1.9 billion monthly active traffic as a big tree. The prospectus shows that Kuaishou's marketing spending has increased from 16.4% in 2017 to 48.8% in the first three quarters of 2020, and nearly half of the revenue has been spent by marketing customer acquisition activities.

How difficult it is for Kuaishou to surpass TikTok can be imagined. Even the question of "whether it can keep pace with vibrato" must be drawn with a big question mark.

The capital market will not fail to understand this truth, especially in stark contrast to Douyin. As a result, since February 17, Kuaishou's stock price has begun to fall all the way, with a minimum of only HK$64.5 and only 15% at its peak. In the most recent trading day, Kuaishou closed at HK$103.5, evaporating more than 75% compared to HK$417.8 at its peak.

Why is it that Su Hua + Cheng Yi laughed at the "match made in heaven" at that time, but now it is not fragrant? In fact, an internal letter from a previous Kuaishou veteran employee may give us a glimpse of why.

In June 2020, Zhu Lantian, the former No. 50 employee of Kuaishou, wrote a 2,000-word article exposing various internal problems of Kuaishou, "Talking about the disease of our company", which brought out issues such as "the company's people's hearts are floating", "internal competition", "information is opaque", "department factions are lined up", "like airborne managers" and so on.

"Starting from the first-level department, the previous Xu Xin and Thomas everyone knows that they are not convinced of each other, the audio and video teacher Yu Bing and the client's Chunyu teacher invade each other to infiltrate the business, the overseas KT's Zack and XYZ's Yuanxi competition, the hr department's Liu Feng and the administrative story, the recommended two mountains and the total and Wan guidance, and then talk about the second-level department, the story of Lin Phosphorus and Zhou Chi, the story of lin phosphorus and Zhou Chi that has recently made a storm, and the mutual intransigence between the commercial products in the Taiwan CI and the business leader. The competition between commercial sales of the first and the second sales department is really too much, is there not so much competition between Su Hua and Yi Xiao in these two years, is it still as close as before 2017? ”

As soon as such an unobtrusive and directly painful article was issued, the ripples caused at that time can be imagined. Su Hua, the CEO at the time, also responded directly, to the effect that he acknowledged the problem and hoped that everyone would work together to solve it; many problems were known and under processing.

"Factional" has long been an "old actor", and many large domestic manufacturers have also had such problems, and within Kuaishou, this problem will undoubtedly be linked to the "dual-core management" model and be interpreted in various ways.

Can CEO Yi Shuai usher in a turnaround?

Stock prices reflect market expectations for a company's future. How Kuaishou ushered in a turnaround, in the case of short video users almost reaching the ceiling, there seems to be only one way, that is, to seize traffic from other short video platforms such as Douyin and Video Number and obtain user growth.

In order to obtain user growth, improving the product strength of Kuaishou is the key. Perhaps this is also an important reason for Cheng Yixiao, who focuses on products, to return to the CEO position.

In fact, Cheng Yixiao personally went out on the horse, and there were already traces to follow, and even some of the meaning of "soldiers and horses did not move, grain and grass went first".

In July and September of this year, Kuaishou carried out a series of relatively large organization and personnel structure adjustments. Among them, in the personnel adjustment in July this year, the growth department under the responsibility of Yan Qiang, who has become senior vice president of Kuaishou, was split, and the overall growth business was assigned to Wang Jianwei. At that time, some insiders said that the relevant decision was personally decided by Cheng Yixiao, and Yan Qiang was cut. Immediately after the adjustment in September, Yan Qiang released a full email announcing his departure.

In addition to personnel changes, the bigger change within Kuaishou is to shift from functional to business unit structure, and establish an e-commerce division, a commercialization division, an international business department, and a game division. The person in charge of the main station production and transportation line is Wang Jianwei, the person in charge of the original product, the person in charge of the e-commerce business department is XiaoGu, the person in charge of the former X7 business, the person in charge of the commercial business department is Ma Hongbin, the person in charge of the international business department is Qiu Guangyu, and the person in charge of the game business department is Xu Jie.

Now it seems that it is not too much to interpret a series of adjustments to the personnel and organizational structure in July and September this year as the early preparation for Cheng Yixiao to take over the CEO.

Some investors told Zhi Dun: "Kuaishou was too Buddhist before and was labeled as a 'slow company', these problems Cheng Yixiao and Su Hua also realized, so at this time, a person needs to stand up, representing the determination of Kuaishou reform, but also an account for the market." ”

But product power is not Cheng Yixiao's personal or overnight achievement, let's give a few examples.

The first is the underlying monogatari. As a double-edged sword, the underlying Monogatari label may give Kuaishou more sinking market and vague expectations of true expression, but it makes Kuaishou shorter than douyin in terms of realistic tone and consumption ability cognition. Many anchors of Kuaishou and Douyin synchronous updates almost undisguisedly regard Douyin as "biological", do content updates at the first time, interact with fans with a higher frequency, etc., and the content quality often further affects each other with the tone of the platform, and how should Kuaishou, who cannot give up the "old iron basic disk", choose in the future?

Communities & Tools. Kuaishou once positioned itself as a community and gained user precipitation and growth. However, compared with the tool attributes under the blessing of the douyin algorithm, the community attributes of Kuaishou are inevitably too warm. Community is emotionally linked to interest, beautiful but not sexy enough. The tool is just needed, and the corresponding is the high frequency use, long stay and rapid growth of vibrato users.

Public and private domain traffic. This is a cliché topic, if nothing else, the kuaishou anchor Simba after the "sale of fake bird's nest", is still in the Kuaishou smooth water, you can see the impact of Kuaishou private domain traffic. I believe that Kuaishou is not without entanglement with the "Simbas", but the "Simbas" who can't be left behind are still active enough to explain the problem, and Kuaishou has not yet cut off the determination and confidence of the "bad" private domain traffic in the platform.

There are many more problems such as this, after Cheng Yixiao took over as CEO, the question of "whether Kuaishou will be better" will be presented in terms of financial status and operational capabilities, with more specific and direct results, we will wait and see. (Text/Zhiton Qingfeng)