East Buy removed Sun Dongxu as its executive director and CEO, and named New Oriental’s founder Yu Minhong as its chief executive. The appointment came after a dispute (纠纷) involving the company’s most influential live-streamer (主播), Dong Yuhui, intensified last week.
Dong, who was formerly an English teacher at New Oriental Group, became popular as a live-streamer in June last year thanks to his insightful and humorous hosting style. He soon had a huge number of followers, who bought products from East Buy just because of him. His followers on Chinese short-video platform Douyin hit a surprising 20 million as of Sunday. The latest dispute started after the editorial team of East Buy said on Dec 6 that the script used by the star during live-streaming (直播) was written by the team and not by Dong alone. It quickly made a group of online shoppers and many of Dong’s fans question the company for taking credit for his work and longtime efforts.
On Tuesday, Sun Dongxu, then CEO of East Buy, said in a live-stream that neither the editorial team nor Dong had behaved appropriately, adding that Dong is treated well by the company. Sun also criticized the “fan culture”, noting that the Internet users often attack a company because of their idol. He caused a wave of anger among the Internet users with what he said and did during the live-stream.
Later, both Sun and Yu, the founder of New Oriental, as well as Dong, apologized for the incident and clarified that the script used for the live-stream was written by both the editorial team and Dong. However, this didn’t stop the stock price of the Beijing-based company from dropping to HK$26.25 ($3.69) per share on Friday from HK$32.75 on Dec 6. The number of followers on East Buy’s Douyin account was 28 million as of Sunday, a significant drop from over 31 million a week ago.
Zhang Yi, chief analyst at market consultancy iiMedia Research, said, “The incident is basically a strong internal disagreement over making a balanced profit distribution between leading livestreamers and companies or MCN (multichannel network) agencies that manage live-streamers.”
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