THE head of Douyin, TikTok’s sister app in China, is stepping down from her role to take up other duties within parent company ByteDance.
Kelly Zhang is relinquishing the post of Douyin Group chief executive officer, a ByteDance spokesperson confirmed on Wednesday, after an earlier report in Chinese media.
ByteDance will not seek to appoint a successor and Zhang will shift her focus to the video-editing app CapCut, according to a person familiar with the matter, who declined to be named as the plans are private.
ByteDance, the owner of short-video platforms TikTok and Douyin, needs to adopt a sense of crisis and steer clear of complacency, CEO Liang Rubo told staff in a companywide meeting in January. He said he saw several organisational problems that needed to be addressed and lamented ByteDance falling behind in the artificial intelligence race kickstarted by OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Zhang joined ByteDance in 2014 and took on the CEO role at Douyin Group in 2020, becoming one of only a few women in leadership posts among China’s biggest tech firms. In her position, she oversaw ByteDance’s products and operations in China, including Douyin and news aggregator Toutiao.
“I am excited to work together with the team members at CapCut to create our own dreams, and to grow in this AI era to draw a fantasy world together,” Zhang wrote in a social media post, reviewed by Bloomberg. “I will continue to use this entrepreneurial mindset to work hard for the next 10 years at the things I am passionate about.” BLOOMBERG
