ByteDance, now China’s most valuable startup, has been undergoing a management reshuffle to break growth bottlenecks, 36Kr reported on Monday, citing multiple independent sources.
One of the changes in this reshuffle is that Chen Lin, CEO of ByteDance’s news aggregator Jinri Toutiao, will depart away from this relatively mature side of the business to focus on new businesses such as ByteDance’s social apps Duoshan and Feiliao, workplace cooperation tool Lark, education products such as Gogokid and aiKID.
For Chen, one key objective is to build a third app with 100 million daily active users (DAU), said 36Kr, citing an internal source within ByteDance.
Toutiao had 115 million DAU in August, according to market research firm QuestMobile which also indicates that DAU for this app, which went online in August 2012, has stagnated to maintain at this level since once year ago.
ByteDance’s short video app Douyin had more than 320 million DAU KrASIA reported in July, citing ByteDance’s internal data. This does not include users of TikTok, the version of Douyin that’s used outside of China.
Meanwhile, Zhu Wenjia, who was already elevated to take charge of Toutiao while it was still under Chen Lin, will now report directly to Zhang Yiming, the founder of ByteDance. Zhu was once chief architect for Baidu’s search engine and helped ByteDance launch Toutiao Search last month, challenging Baidu’s core search engine business.
ByteDance has not responded to 36Kr‘s request for an official comment on the management reshuffle.
36Kr is KrASIA’s parent company