The company is looking to change department leadership and restructure some of its current businesses to sharpen their focuses, including the team in charge of the main Kuaishou platform, according to a recent report from Jiemian, an outlet affiliated with state-backed Shanghai United Media Group, citing anonymous sources.
Under those plans, Kuaishou’s main business team would also be in charge of the local consumption unit, which will be renamed the recruitment and property unit, the report said.
Meanwhile, the company will set up an author and content ecosystem unit to support short-video content creators, according to the report.
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What is Kuaishou? Understanding China’s video-sharing app
What is Kuaishou? Understanding China’s video-sharing app
Kuaishou did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent on Friday.
If true, the reshuffle shows that the firm is hoping to ride on its financial turnaround to pave the way for growth in the coming years, according to Zhang Yi, founder and chief analyst at market consultancy iiMedia.
The reported business overhaul may help Kuaishou bolster some of its most promising new businesses, according to Zhang.
“Kuaishou is optimising and refining areas with further growth prospects, which is necessary to support their future growth,” said Zhang.
Those areas include real-estate live streams and videos.
Kuaishou said more than 5,500 properties worth over 6.9 billion yuan in total were sold through its platform just between September 6 and October 10, compared with over 10 billion yuan in the full year of 2022.
Some of these sales were made by property agents who were recruited and trained by Kuaishou to appear in live streams and short videos.
As of the end of last year, more than 100 million of its users had watched real estate-related videos or tuned into live-streaming sessions of property sales, data from Kuaishou showed.
The company, whose largest rival is Douyin – ByteDance’s TikTok equivalent in China – has undergone a series of organisational and leadership changes in the past few years.
That followed a series of business changes at Kuaishou, including the establishment of a 12-member management committee in August and a business ecosystem committee in the following month, as well as a major shake-up affecting its e-commerce and monetisation teams.
The latest round of adjustments appeared to involve mid-level management and fall within normal “organisational structural optimisation”, said Zhang Xueru, equity analyst at 86Research.
It would not involve the e-commerce and advertising businesses, so the overall impact on the company would be smaller compared to previous changes, she said.