On this day, Dongfang Selection made an emergency U-turn. At 7:10 p.m. on December 16, Dong Yuhui appeared in the live broadcast room of Lao Yu's gossip.
* In the midst of the noise, the Oriental Selection was finally suspended.
In the early morning of December 16th, the official account of Dongfang Selection Douyin updated the news through signatures: Today is temporarily suspended, and I have thought about it behind closed doors. At noon on the same day, Oriental Selection issued a notice of personnel appointment and dismissal on the Douyin platform, and Chairman Yu Minhong concurrently served as the CEO of Oriental Selection, and removed Sun Dongxu from the position of executive director and CEO of Oriental Selection, effective immediately. However, as of press time, Oriental Selection, a Hong Kong-listed company, has not yet issued a relevant announcement.
This result is not unexpected, in the 6 days since Dong Yuhui disappeared from the live broadcast room, Sun Dongxu and Dongfang Selection gradually moved towards the opposite of "iron fans". Although the hustle and bustle of bringing goods was once as usual, the flow of exodus undoubtedly foreshadowed a crisis.
As of 5 p.m. on December 16, the number of followers of Dongfang Selection's Douyin account has increased from 3115 on the 10th20,000 to 2,84460 thousand. And the comment area of the live broadcast room is waiting for Dong Yuhui to denounce Sun Dongxu's voice, which may mean that this game is far from over.
However, it was also on this day that Dongfang Selection made an emergency U-turn. At 7:10 p.m. on December 16, Dong Yuhui appeared in Lao Yu's gossip live broadcast room, responding to the incident and Sun Dongxu's dismissal. In the meantime, Yu Minhong said that the dismissal of Sun Dongxu had nothing to do with Dong Yuhui, and Sun Dongxu would still stay in the company and contribute to Dongfang Selection.
For a number of companies to throw an olive branch to themselves. Dong Yuhui responded that he had rejected all invitations in the past few days. "I was supposed to come back yesterday, but I was canceled due to heavy snowfall, so I was scheduled to come back today. Dong Yuhui said that even if he really doesn't work and leaves Dongfang Selection in the future, he hopes that Dongfang Selection will be good, and he doesn't want to see his hard work ruined.
Fans run away, and the fire is hard to extinguish.
This was originally a small matter within the company, but it turned into a surging public opinion because of improper handling. ”
At noon on December 14, Yu Minhong appeared to respond to the question of the copywriter of "Jilin Trip", that is, the small essay controversy. In the evening, Sun Dongxu issued an apology**, not only apologizing to netizens for his "aggressive" demeanor, the action of putting the mobile phone on the table, and mentioning Dong Yuhui's salary, but also called these behaviors "no grace and bearing" and "unprofessional" performance.
thought that a series of actions could calm down the small essay incident, but unexpectedly, it was labeled by the outside world as the senior management of Dongfang Selection Company "raised high and gently put down".
For this "small internal matter", Dongfang Selection is quite passive.
As early as December 10, Dong Yuhui, who was originally scheduled to broadcast live from 3:30 to 6:30 p.m., did not appear in the live broadcast room on time.
This also makes the small composition gradually evolve into a shock wave. On December 11, the stock price of Oriental Selection was **713%, and the market value evaporated by 2.4 billion Hong Kong dollars. On the same day, more than 600,000 people poured into the Oriental Selection Benchmarking Account - Gaotu Jiapin, and in just one day, the sales of Gaotu Jiapin's live broadcast room reached 250,000 to 500,000, which is equivalent to 1 3 of its sales in November. On the same day, Xueersi's Xueersi Youpin Douyin live broadcast room was rebroadcast. In the next few days, many fans who claimed to have been "expelled" from Dongfang Selection flocked to the live broadcast room of Gaotu Jiapin and Xueersi Youpin.
On December 11, there were only 880,000 people in the Dongfang Selection live broadcast room, while the data in the previous three days was 12.1 million to 16.91 million.
Until the evening of December 12, Sun Dongxu responded to the incident in the live broadcast room for 10 minutes, and finally held a meeting with fans because of the drop of his mobile phone, **Dong Yuhui's annual salary is more than tens of millions of words spread on the Internet, and an official response has properly developed into a "personality collapse".
A few hours later, the party Dong Yuhui came forward, "It is not the company's original intention to make trouble now, nor is it the original intention of the fans" It is obviously difficult to save the situation for the company.
Oriental Selection also tried to turn the page.
According to the relevant data provided by the company, on December 14, the daily sales of self-operated products in the live broadcast room hit a record high. Subsequently, Oriental Selection started a three-day selection brand day activity. Although Dong Yuhui was not among the live broadcast posters from the 15th to the 17th, he threw out a discount**-95% off unlimited self-operated products, and paid members of the Oriental Selection App can receive more benefits such as 15 yuan coupons.
The subsidy activities intended to appease consumers were exposed, but Dongfang Selection exposed "out of control". On the evening of December 15th, Dongfang Selection anchor Tianquan imitated CEO Sun Dongxu to drop his mobile phone during the live broadcast, and caused fans to frantically shut down because of his extreme remarks, and the live broadcast was 4 hours in the evening of the same day, and Dongfang Selection lost 700,000 fans.
Cicada mother data shows that from December 10th to 15th, Dongfang Selection held a total of 5 live broadcasts, of which the number of ** people was as high as 44.6 million on the evening of the 15th, but the conversion rate of the 5 live broadcasts was less than 5%.
In 6 days, the number of fans of Dongfang Selection's Douyin account has fallen below 30 million, and nearly 3 million fans have been lost. In contrast, Dong Yuhui's number of fans is constantly **, and the current number of fans is 16.7 million, an increase of 5 million compared with before the small composition turmoil.
Sun Dongxu: Dongfang selects the highest-paid employees.
The internal chat records of Dongfang Selection circulated in the market show that Sun Dongxu opposes Dong Yuhui's return to Dongfang Selection, and Yu Minhong faces the situation of choosing between Sun Dongxu and anchor Dong Yuhui. In this regard, Yu Minhong responded positively, saying that "it is not so serious".
Now it seems that Sun Dongxu has temporarily withdrawn from the stage.
Sun Dongxu is an "old man" who has adhered to New Oriental for 16 years.
After graduating from Nankai University in 2007, Sun Dongxu began to teach at Tianjin New Oriental, and successively served as the President of Hefei New Oriental, the President of Xi'an New Oriental, the Regional President of New Oriental Northwest Region, and the Vice President of New Oriental Group.
At that time, Dong Yuhui worked at Xi'an New Oriental, and later became the youngest English teaching and research director of New Oriental. Dong Yuhui mentioned this experience in an interview with the Beijing News, saying that Sun Dongxu was his Bole, and when he was in Xi'an School, Sun Dongxu was the principal and he was a teacher.
In January 2019, Sun Dongxu began to serve as the co-chief executive officer of New Oriental Technology Holdings*** and the co-chief executive officer of Beijing Xuncheng.
In March 2019, New Oriental** was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. However, after the listing, New Oriental**'s performance has changed dramatically. In August 2019, New Oriental ** released its first financial report after listing, with a loss of 641090,000 yuan, which is the first loss in 6 years since its establishment.
At the same time as New Oriental** released its financial report, it was announced that Pan Xin, executive director and COO, who had been in office for less than a year, would resign, and Sun Dongxu would take over. In August 2019, Sun Dongxu officially served as the executive director and CEO of New Oriental.
By the 2020 fiscal year, New Oriental's ** loss reached 75.8 billion yuan, an increase of 11 times over the previous year. Then, the "double reduction" policy was introduced. New Oriental** began to transform.
However, the live streaming business is not ideal. Dong Yuhui once mentioned that in the early days of the live broadcast that did not improve, he couldn't see his own value, and it was Sun Dongxu who kept motivating himself.
With the live broadcast out of the circle, in January this year, New Oriental** changed its name to Oriental Selection.
According to the executive compensation disclosed by Dongfang Selection, Sun Dongxu is the highest-paid employee selected by Dongfang. For the year ended May 31, 2023, Sun Dongxu's salary, performance, equity, etc. totaled 1,63910,000 yuan, compared with 10.49 million yuan in the same period of the previous year.
In addition to salary, Sun Dongxu received a lot of cash through ***. In February 2023, he sold at 55**, which was at a high of HK$6,115, sold 1.93 million shares and cashed out 1HK$0.7 billion in cash. The next day, he again ended with 56At an average price of HK$9,451, 1.93 million shares were sold, and 1HK$100 million in cash.
On April 11, Dongfang Selection issued a share "red envelope" and granted 3045 share awards to 154 qualified participants (grantees).90,000 shares. Among them, Sun Dongxu obtained a total of 3 million shares, worth about 87 million Hong Kong dollars according to the ** price of the day.
Who moved whose cake?
Oriental selection**, many companies threw olive branches to Dong Yuhui.
Among them, Luo Yonghao shouted: "There is really no need to waste his life to work and support him to start a business smoothly." On December 15, NetEase Youdao's strategic consultant announced that he had decided to poach Dong Yuhui, who would be the co-CEO of a listed company as long as he came, and he would be an executive directly.
Regarding the removal of Sun Dongxu as CEO of Dongfang Selection, Ying Zhongdi, master's tutor of Zhejiang University of Media and Communication and executive director of China (Hangzhou) Live E-commerce Research Institute, believes that this is a wise choice. Judging from the current ** reaction, the public and fans are relatively satisfied with this result. In the next step, I hope that Dongfang Selection can truly respect Dong Yuhui and treat Dong Yuhui wellGive the right internal company status and revenue returns, otherwise it will be a matter of time before the two parties part ways.
There was a point of view that "New Oriental has always had a culture of intimidation, and they don't care about it up and down, and it's quite special." Many people within Oriental Selection have quoted the above views and said that the clash between New Oriental's corporate culture and the fan circle culture is essentially a conflict between the old and new cultures.
In September this year, Dongfang Selection positioned itself in the financial report as a live shopping platform focusing on carefully selecting good things for customers, a product technology company that continues to focus on the self-operated agricultural products of Dongfang Selection brand, and a cultural communication company that brings customers a pleasant spiritual experience. It's not MCN either.
In fact, Dongfang Selection, which is still continuing the management model of the era of education and training, is no longer suitable for the era of live streaming. When communicating with Dongfang Selection insiders, the reporter noticed that the anchors of Dongfang Selection did not have a performance appraisal mechanism, and sales and wages were not linked. The relevant person in charge of the Oriental Selection Financial Report revealed that the company does not need to share the anchor and does not need to buy traffic, so the take rate (acceptance rate) is relatively high in the industry.
Dong Yuhui is not only a head anchor, he is also a phenomenal anchor. Ying Zhongdi told the Shell financial reporter that such an anchor is destined to be unable to be bound by the brand, scale and advantage of the institution. For example, Yuanwang and Jia Nailiang took the vast majority of the live broadcast revenue to belong to Jia Nailiang's team, and Yuanwang only took a small percentage (similar to the management fee) of the share;This approach is in line with the actual level of contribution and is also wise.
Ying Zhongdi said that it is not uncommon for the industry to have internal contradictions or even relationship breakdowns. As a listed company like New Oriental, it is understandable to build its own ** chain, develop its own APP (want to build its own platform without Douyin), and even hope to weaken Dong Yuhui's status and role.
In the view of Zhang Shule, an Internet industry analyst, the difficulty in binding the head anchor lies in the asymmetric dynamic change between the rising popularity and brand strength, which can only be lured by profit. However, if it is only an Internet celebrity who is a wage earner, and is more of a professional manager who is only at the front desk rather than in charge of the overall situation, it will be difficult to achieve this kind of benefit distribution, and it will form a checks and balances to avoid a monopoly of one family, and the outside world will have the perception that "the wood show will be destroyed by the forest wind". The only solution is to bind its interests to the company's equity deeply, but this will inevitably cut off the interests of the real hands, which is a game process, often underwater, but this time it surfaced due to the popularity of Internet celebrities, which led to a comprehensive attack by external factors, and finally survived.
Zhang Shule believes that Dongfang Selection must also choose to put eggs in different baskets, and this incident just shows that eggs in one basket are fragile. But the next Dong Yuhui is difficult to cultivate, and the occasional phenomenon of the right time, place and people will not always appear in one team. What Dongfang Selection has to do is to continue to use its advantages in enterprise management to strengthen the industrial chain of agriculture, agriculture and agriculture, and form a stable moat, rather than being driven by Internet celebrities.
The founder is a top-notch Internet celebrity, and he will also choose a variety of operations to avoid path dependence and personality overturning, but once a particularly strong Internet celebrity appears, there will also be a big tail, let alone MCN that appears as a brokerage company. This contradiction is difficult to reconcile, after all, making a person popular is a trend, and it is also a brand marketing choice, once the Internet celebrity overshadows the brand, either give the Internet celebrity greater rights and interests, or choose to establish more Internet celebrities for balance, but both are difficult, especially in the context of the management interests cut to the front desk. ”
Beijing News Shell Financial Reporter Zhao Fangyuan Editor Wang Jinyu Proofreader Lu Qian.