Former Kuaishou Executive Tony Qiu Joins Meituan
Tony Qiu, the former head of Kuaishou’s International Business, has recently joined Meituan and temporarily serves as assistant to firm founder and CEO Wang Xing. It is not clear which business sector the former Kuaishou executive will be responsible for next, LatePost reported on July 12.
Qiu joined Kuaishou in August 2020. Previously, he was the chief operating officer of Didi’s Internationalization Division. He worked at Didi for five years and at Kuaishou for 18 months, participating in the internationalization of the two companies.
In the ride-hailing battle between Didi and Uber, he led Didi to start from scratch in Latin America and finally surpassed Uber. In the short video battle between Kuaishou and TikTok, he led Kuaishou to carry out a fourth round of overseas expansion. After spending more than 10 billion yuan ($1.49 billion), this round of expansion ended with lowering the growth target and suspending the opening of new markets.
Some Meituan veterans have also changed, involving the firm’s digital platform and in-store business group.
Recently, Han Jian, the CTO of Meituan‘s At-Home Business Group and the head of its R&D platform, was transferred to serve as CTO of the Meituan platform, reporting to Li Shubin, the head of the Meituan platform. His position was taken over by Sun Zhizhao, his subordinate and former head of distribution technology of Meituan‘s At-Home Business Group.
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Previously, Meituan‘s platform did not have a unified technical leader, and technical teams were distributed under various business departments. After Han Jian was transferred to Meituan‘s platform division, the search and NLP (natural language processing) Department, Growth Technology Department, Service Experience Department and App Technology Department were disassembled, reorganized and merged according to their functions, forming new departments divided by front-end, back-end, algorithms, testing and products. Han Jian said internally that he did three things when he went to Meituan Platform: reducing costs, increasing efficiency and improving quality. This is also the core proposition of Meituan this year.
In the past six months, the in-store business group has experienced the change of the heads of two groups. In April, Wang Yiming, the head of the in-store catering group, was transferred to become responsible for the sales training of the in-store business group. He was replaced by Zhang Jian, the former vice president of Spark Education. In June, Li Yang, the person in charge of intercity transportation (including passenger tickets and railway tickets), departed his job, and Liu Yanxiang, the person in charge of the ticket group, was placed in charge of the business. Li Yang once served as the individual in charge of ride-hailing and cycling at Meituan.
