Dong Yuhui stays on at East Buy after CEO ouster

Ti Gong

China's top livestreaming e-commerce star Dong Yuhui, recently embroiled in a public dispute with Sun Dongxu, former CEO of New Oriental's e-commerce unit East Buy, has confirmed he will remain with the company.

The announcement came during a Saturday night live session with New Oriental founder and chairman Yu Minhong, addressing speculation about Dong's future after the dispute led to Sun's departure.

Earlier in the day, New Oriental has removed the CEO and executive director of East Buy, and said chairman Yu Minhong will take over in a temporary role according to an official post on Saturday morning.

Yu clarified that Sun's exit was unrelated to the controversy in the live session watched by millions.

Ti Gong

East Buy has suspended a livestreaming session scheduled for Saturday, saying it will carry out self criticism in the wake of a row regarding one of its top livestreaming hosts which caused an online boycott and a drop in stock prices.

The online controversy emerged last week when East Buy's official livestreaming account on Douyin pointed out its promotional material was prepared and written by teamwork rather than solely by Dong.

Online discussion hasn't subsided after both Yu and Sun offered apologies on Thursday for recent misbehavior from the social media account handler team and improper internal management issues.

Unprofessional behavior and mishandling of internal management issue led to poor performance on the stock market.

East Buy has lost more than 2 million followers on Douyin since Thursday and the Hong Kong-listed share price sank 5.5 percent on Friday as the apologies weren't able to ease worries over the company's internal management complications.

East Buy started a three-day livestreaming session on Friday without mentioning the issue, and online bickering further escalated over whether the whole editorial team or Dong himself should take credit for many acclaimed promotional materials and phrasing.

Another livestreaming host Tian Quan further provoked online shoppers on Friday night, saying they could go ahead and delist their East Buy accounts and can also feel free to fully leverage the discount coupons to make the company suffer more loss.

This then turned into further boycott, when hundreds of thousands of online viewers rush into the livestreaming sessions of Goatu, another online tutor-turned livestreaming e-commerce player.

Discussions also have arisen as to whether East Buy should stick with the former English tutor, who became a social media sensation last year thanks to his down-to-earth style, or to better leverage team work and spend more effort on offering high value-for-money offerings.

Ti Gong