Head of Kuaishou Internationalization Division Leaves

Chinese short video platform Kuaishou held a meeting among its Internationalization Division on Thursday. Cheng Yixiao, founder and CEO of Kuaishou, announced some personnel adjustments in the division, LatePost reported on Thursday.

Qiu Guangyu, the former head of the division, announced that he would leave the job in the near future due to personal reasons. As a result, the production, transportation, and commercialization divisions will report directly to Cheng Yixiao. In addition, Chen Dingjia, CTO, and Yu Haibo, Head of Security Compliance, will directly support overseas business development.

Kuaishou executives believe that this adjustment will help strengthen the business collaboration between domestic and overseas markets and enhance the priority of the company’s overseas business.

Qiu Guangyu joined Kuaishou in July 2020 and is responsible for its international business. Earlier, in 2015, he had worked at Didi and was promoted to COO of the Internationalization Division in August 2019. During his tenure at Didi, Qiu was responsible for promoting the company’s acquisition of 99, a Brazilian startup, and helping Didi enter the South American market.

At the beginning of 2021, Qiu proposed to increase the daily active users (DAU) of Kuaishou in overseas markets to 100 million by the end of the year, and hoped to lead Kuaishou to become a competitor of TikTok within three years. At that time, Kuaishou’s global DAU was only 10 million, while TikTok’s global MAU was close to 1 billion.

In order to achieve the goal, Qiu integrated several overseas products into Kwai. By the end of 2021, the number of DAUs had reached about 60 million, which was still far from the original target of 100 million. But Cheng still sees internationalization as the biggest growth opportunity for the company, according to one Kuaishou insider.

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Cheng said earlier that Kuaishou has long been optimistic about the potential of short video platforms in overseas markets. Since last year, Kuaishou began to focus on the development of key areas, improve the efficiency of single market, and greatly reduce its investment in areas with low returns.