BEIJING, October 29 (TMTPOST)— TikTok’s largest rival in China announced one of its most important leadership changes on Friday. Mr. Su Hua resigned as the Chief Executive Officer from October 29, succeeded by Mr. Cheng Yixiao, the co-founder, Executive Director, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Product Officer, and Su maintains positions of the Executive Director and Chairman of the Board, Chinese short video company Kuaishou disclosed in a filing with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.  

Kuaishou said the change in management role will bring Su more time to focus on long-term strategy and exploration of new development directions. And effective on October 29, Cheng, as the new chief executive, takes charge of daily operation and business development and reports to Su.

The announcement confirmed some of recent rumors about the management’s possible turnover, but at least at this moment, Su seemed not retire from the company where he worked as the chief executive since 2013, when Cheng and his team were stumbling out of the danger of failure. Above all things, the leadership shake-up suggests Kuaishou’s leadership duo structure in the past seven years came to an end. The company has remained the structure since the merger of Su and Cheng’s teams in 2013, with Su as the leader of investments and acquisitions, commercialization, human resources, finances and overseas business and Cheng responsible for products, operation, e-commerce, gaming and other key businesses.

The change aims to address the leadership duo mode’s low efficiency since both of two leaders were in charge of businesses and neither of them concerned future development, Tencent’s news media outlet LatePost cited Kuaishou’s insiders.  

Earlier this year,  Kuaishou’s arch-rivals—Douyin and TikTok’s parent ByteDance also announced longtime CEO’s departure. "I decided to quit and leave daily management to focus on those key works in the long run such as long-term strategies, corporate culture and social responsibilities,” the co-founder Zhang Yiming wrote in his resignation letter to staff in May. He showed desire for learning and systemic thinking, studying new things and making experiments and experience on them, so as to" create more possibilities for the company in a period of ten years”.