Douyin CEO Kelly Zhang resigns to take new role at ByteDance

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 Ltd.

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 organizational problems that needed to be addressed and lamented ByteDance falling behind in the artificial intelligence race kickstarted by OpenAI’s ChatGPT.