The Chinese short video giant's former vice president has severed ties with the firm as it struggles to expand in the domestic market, and beyond.
ByteDance's domestic contender has long been struggling to develop new moves to grow its user base. Image: Credit to Pixabay
Chenan Xia (夏辰安), the former vice president of Kuaishou, left the firm in December 2019 after he had been appointed as the head of the Strategy Department in May 2019, a Chinese media noticed.
The move has coincided with the company's lingering user growth, both in its domestic and overseas markets.
After years of aggressive growth, Chinese short video giants' – Kuaishou and ByteDance-owned Douyin – Monthly Active User (MAU) data stopped growing in September 2019 due to the well-saturated market conditions, forcing those once-rapidly-rising firms to pivot and diversify their businesses, or "going overseas."
The short video company has a diversified portfolio of products within the mainland, including education, e-commerce, and gaming. The firm, in recent times, started to attract multinational venture capitalists' attention with its burgeoning Multi-Channel Network (MCN) scene.
Its famous competitor, ByteDance, had already expanded into the overseas markets, mostly emerging regions like India, South East Asia and the Middle East, through its flagship TikTok. The rocketing app had an average MAU of around 800 million in 2019, according to BusinessofApps, a mobile intelligence platform.
The company last drew attention by giving out over USD 1 billion worth "red pockets" during the Chinese New Year festival and pouring CNY 3 billion into China Central Television’s (CCTV)’s Spring Festival Gala, which attracted over a billion viewers.
The McKinseyite "digital transformation expert" Chenan Xia's leave may be about the company's failed domestic growth, a former senior manager at Kuaishou who prefers to stay anonymous told EqualOcean. "Yet Chenan Xia is not an exceptional case: Kuaishou was never a stable company in terms of its executive directors," the source added.