Su Hua, a co-founder of China video-sharing and live-streaming platform Kuaishou Technology, will step down as chairman effective Oct. 29 “due to his other business commitments,” the company said in a statement on Friday evening.
Su, worth $3.4 billion on the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires List today, will remain an executive director. Before co-founding Beijing-headquartered Kuaishou, Su worked as an engineer at Baidu and Google.
Cheng Yixiao, Kuaishou’s current CEO and also a co-founder, will also serve as chairman starting Oct. 29. The former Hewlett-Packard executive is worth $2.7 billion on the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires List.
Kuaishou, whose rivals include short-form video app Douyin owned by China’s ByteDance, went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2021. ByteDance is best known internationally for its TikTok app.
Kuaishou’s stock offering raised $5.4 billion from the sale of 365 million shares at HK$115 each, one of the world’s largest tech IPOs at the time, and valued the company at more than $160 billion. Its shares peaked at approximately HK$400 shortly after; they closed at HK$56.55 on Friday amid a broad downturn in China tech stocks, heightened U.S.-China geopolitical tension, and slower economic growth in the country, the world’s second-largest economy. Hong Kong’s benchmark Hang Seng Index lost 0.7% on Friday to close at 17,172.13, its lowest level in nearly a year. The exchange is closed for the Chung Yeung Festival on Monday.
Kuaishou’s revenue in the first six months of 2023 rose by 24% from a year earlier to 52.9 billion yuan; it earned 605 million yuan compared with a loss of 9.4 billion yuan in the first half of 2022. Chinese Internet heavyweight Tencent owns about 11.7% of the company.
In another board switch, Kuaishou said last month that Xiao Xing, a professor and head of the accounting department of the School of Economics and Management at China’s elite Tsinghua University, would become an independent director.
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