In a few days, it will be one year since Dong Yuhui left Oriental Selection and went solo. On July 25, 2024, Oriental Selection issued an announcement on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, announcing its official separation from its wholly-owned subsidiary Hehui Peer. Dong Yuhui personally holds 100% of its shares at a price of 76.58 million. Later, Yu Minhong issued an open letter, saying, "I arranged the money for Yu Hui to buy the company, and the company was given to Yu Hui." In addition, he also secured all the profits from Going with Hui to Dong Yuhui. The announcement shows that Hehui Peer’s net profit in the past half year was 140 million yuan.
Now, this is known as "the most honorable breakup in the live streaming industry", and it may be time to re-examine it.
In the past year, Dong Yuhui's live broadcast room once reached the peak of popularity, but soon faced a growth bottleneck. In the first half of this year, the average number of daily viewers and per capita stay time in the live broadcast room dropped significantly year-on-year. Yu Minhong led Oriental Selection to deeply explore the supply chain and bet on self-operated brands, but suffered from brain drain and slow expansion of offline channels. From deep cultivation of content to product development, from personal IP to team building, the two companies are exploring in different directions and are also under pressure.
Is this decent separation really a relief? From the current point of view, neither side seems to be able to continue the high glory at that time, but based on their respective long-term considerations, it is not necessarily a bad thing.
Dong Yuhui and Yu Minhong,
Everyone has his own difficulties
One year after the separation, the development status of the two companies has become the focus of public attention.
Their main business is still live streaming to bring goods, let’s look at it from the data dimension.
In terms of the number of fans, as of mid-July, Walking with the Fai has exceeded the 30 million mark, while Oriental Selection is lagging behind, with the number of fans still hovering around 28 million. Data from Cicada Mama shows that in terms of live broadcast viewing, in the past 30 days (June 21 to July 20), the average daily live broadcast viewing of You Hui Peer was 1573.7W, while Oriental Selection was only 384.3W. In comparison of sales trends, although Peer With Hui showed a significant decline, it was still higher than Oriental Selection.
In other words, in terms of fans, views and sales, Hehui Peer, led by Dong Yuhui, has a clear advantage.
Picture source / Cicada mother
But behind the advantages, problems also emerge.
Feigua data shows that in the first half of 2025, the average number of daily viewers in the live broadcast room of Youhui Peer dropped sharply by 45% year-on-year; the number of fans increased to 3.22 million, a far cry from the 12 million in the same period last year; the average length of stay in the live broadcast room also dropped from 3.2 minutes at the end of 2023 to 1.8 minutes, which is far lower than the platform average.
In addition to the stalled data in the Live With Hui live broadcast room, the number of followers of Dong Yuhui's personal Douyin account has dropped by 600,000 in the past four months, from 27.68 million in February to 27.04 million. Because the content posted by the account is of low quality, mostly scenes such as roads and telephone poles, Douyin has judged it as low-quality content; in June, "Walking with Hui" dropped to fifth place on Douyin's sales list.
In fact, Dong Yuhui is not the only anchor who has stalled. Under the pressure of aesthetic fatigue and peer competition, the golden age of top anchors has become a thing of the past. Last year, Yu Minhong and Dong Yuhui were at the top of public opinion due to incidents such as essays and family separation. Now it is normal for the data to cool down due to the decline in popularity.
But the underlying risk is that Weonghui has not yet established a supply chain system and relies too much on Dong Yuhui’s personal IP to support sales. Once the live broadcast room cools down, the risk of lack of products will be magnified.
According to the observation of "Dingjiao One", the products sold in the Youhui Peer live broadcast room are mainly food and beverages, clothing and household items, and the supply still comes from third parties. At the same time, it is also working hard to support other anchors. Dong Yuhui’s frequency of broadcasting has been reduced from daily to three times a week, and he has gradually shifted from being a front-end anchor to behind-the-scenes planning and IP incubation.
On the other side, the situation of Dongfang Selection seems to be more difficult.
Its interim results for fiscal year 2025 (June-November 2024) show that revenue from continuing operations fell 9.3% year-on-year to 2.187 billion yuan, and at the same time it turned from profit to loss, from last year's profit of 160 million yuan to a net loss of 96.503 million yuan. The change in performance is closely related to the divestiture of Hui Peer.
Unlike Y.P.E.P., which focuses on content development, Dongfang Selection focuses on the supply chain side, building a self-operated brand with the highest ROI but the most difficult implementation, and focusing on achieving the goal of becoming an "Online Sam". However, the interim report shows that the number of paid members of Oriental Selection APP is 228,300. Although it has increased by 84.41% year-on-year, member contribution only accounts for 13.6% of the overall GMV. Compared with Sam, whose profits mainly rely on membership fees, Oriental Selection's data is still low.
In terms of offline business expansion, last year Yu Minhong announced that he would rely on 800 teaching points to explore a combination of online and offline models. At present, offline exploration only stops at smart retail cabinets. In the past, many speculations about Oriental Select offline member stores have not yet been confirmed.
At the organizational level, the same old problems persist. Not long ago, the popular Oriental Selection anchor Dundun (Wang Ruodun) resigned. According to public data, at least three core anchors announced their departure after Dong Yuhui. The issue of talent loss once again aroused doubts from the outside world.
Looking back on this year, the supply chain shortcomings of Hui Peer and the traffic anxiety of Dongfang Selection are still unresolved problems for each.
Live broadcast bifurcation:
Make products or create anchors?
Strictly speaking, since the moment of separation, Oriental Selection and Youhui Peering are no longer competitors in the traditional sense, but are moving forward on two completely different paths.
Zhuang Shuai, a visiting consultant to the China Chain Store and Franchise Association and an expert in the retail e-commerce industry, told "Dingjiao One" that the two companies have made it clear since their separation that Dongfang Selection is a supply chain company, building its own brands and selling self-operated products; the core of the company is Dong Yuhui himself, who is a super anchor, and will cultivate more anchors to "act as shopping guides" to sell a variety of products by strengthening content attributes.
The two routes determine their investment directions and are completely different. Dongfang Selection must be heavy on investment, have a long cycle, and concentrate on making products; Yihui Peer is asset-light and highly dependent, and is affected by fluctuations in the popularity of anchors at any time.
When the company was separated last year, many people in the industry speculated whether Hehui Peer would supplement its supply chain resources in the future. However, in the past year, Hehui Peer still has not made any major progress in building its own supply chain.
Zhuang Shuai said that not having its own supply chain resources will lead to low profit margins on the one hand, and instability on the other, facing the risk of shortages at any time, and increasing quality control problems. What needs to be more noted is that the sales of the model of "With Hui Peer" mainly depend on the super anchor. Once the super anchor overturns, the transaction volume may fluctuate significantly.
A live broadcast e-commerce professional analyzed to "Dingjian One" that compared to Li Jiaqi's beauty and Viya's clothing, Dong Yuhui does not have a strong attribute label. Therefore, it is not that supply chain cannot be done by Hui Peer, but it is difficult to find an ideal category.
But on the path of "content", Dong Yuhui keeps making moves.
On July 3, he opened a new account "Lan Zhi Chun Xu", focusing on the fields of culture and tourism, attracting 1.5 million fans in a week; on the 9th, the account launched a new column "Creators Please Turn on the Micro", with Dong Yuhui talking to directors Huang Jianxin and Jia Zhangke, focusing on the behind-the-scenes and front-stage aspects of Chinese films.
Picture source/Screenshot of Douyin APP
Immediately afterwards, Lanzhi Chunxu released a series of columns called "Travel to Know All Things". The program focused on the theme of visiting museums, science and technology museums, art galleries, zoos, botanical gardens, etc., and positioned itself for historical and cultural exploration and knowledge popularization.
In these programs, the live broadcast room still has links to bring books, daily necessities, etc. Xin Dou data shows that the estimated sales of the live broadcast on July 9 were 2.5 million to 5 million yuan, with a total of 3.82 million views.
On the other hand, Oriental Selection has increased its self-operated products and membership model layout. Some time ago, it launched self-operated sanitary napkins priced at less than 1 yuan/piece, and sold out to 300,000 packs in half a day. "Dingjiao One" also noticed that the shopping software "Oriental Selection App" also carries more room for imagination. New Oriental's first online family education forum was chosen to be broadcast here, perhaps in an attempt to attract vertical users and tap potential members by introducing educational content.
It can be seen that one of them extends to the content, and the other goes deep into the product and user system. Li Hao, founder of Cass Consulting, bluntly stated to "Dingjiao One" that Oriental Selection is an e-commerce company, while Peer with Hui is an MCN.
This also directly affects their attractiveness to external cooperation.
An MCN practitioner told "Dingjiao One" that although both Dongfang Selection and Hehui Peer have gone through old-fashioned transformation to create differentiation in their live broadcast rooms, in terms of the overall product delivery logic, Oriental Selection is a corporate IP, and Hehui Peer is a personal IP. This will lead to the fact that if you are a supplier, the core appeal is "stable sales of goods" and you need long-term, stable, low-volatility channels, you will tend to choose Dongfang Selection; if you are a brand owner, hoping to make a name for yourself in the short term or a hit product, you will give priority to Hehui Peer, which has a huge fan base.
Either way, though, there are costs.
For Oriental Selection, after Dong Yuhui went solo, traffic dropped off a cliff, which meant that growth slowed down and conversion became difficult; for Youhui Peer, although there is innovation in content, it is difficult to get rid of dependence on Dong Yuhui personally, and any fluctuation in public opinion may affect the basic sales.
In the previous "water-retaining shrimp" incident with Hui, they took the initiative to refund one and compensate three before the investigation was clear. On the surface, the after-sales service was in place, but in fact it was because of the fear of traffic backlash. Now that we are entering film and television and planning new columns, it is difficult to say that it is not a forced upgrade due to traffic anxiety.
Not winning or losing, but two solutions
Although the two companies have struggled after the separation, this is not a question of who wins and who loses, but the two business models are trying to solve the problem each. Where will they go next?
For Dongfang Selection, the biggest test after "de-Huihua" is the reshaping of traffic and brand. The awareness of self-operated brands outside the platform is still low, and the transformation is more difficult than expected. But the advantage of this path is that it is controllable: the brand can be built slowly, the supply chain can be completed step by step, and users can build trust through repeat purchases.
This process may take a long time. Dongfang Zhenxuan has a stable management, abundant cash flow, and has time to "fight for endurance".
In contrast, the core asset of Walk with Hui is still "Dong Yuhui" himself. This means that the company's ability to expand is naturally limited by the "non-replicability of people" - both the content production capacity and the user's trust structure are highly concentrated on one person. Although Hehui Peer has tried to support new anchors and expand content types in the past year, it has been unable to form a stable anchor matrix.
Picture source/Walking with Hui Weibo
Next, Hehui Peer needs to think about how to reduce its dependence on Dong Yuhui and truly become a company that can continue to produce content and stably incubate IP. This will be a great test for Dong Yuhui.
Even so, it is undeniable that the strategy of separation itself is correct.
Li Hao said: "In fact, the essence of the previous Dongfang Selection was MCN, so it was very dangerous, because the most uncertain factor in MCN was people."
After the divestiture of Dongfang Selection, the market value of Oriental Selection evaporated and profits plummeted. However, looking back, this "de-Hui" was successful, and Dong Yuhui is no longer synonymous with Oriental Selection. Nowadays, when it comes to Oriental Selection, "walking with Hui" is more likely to become a keyword in the same breath.
Many former employees of Oriental Screening told "Focus One" that Dong Yuhui is rarely discussed in the department. Everyone is doing their own thing. Rather than saying that the impact (Dong Yuhui's departure) has gradually weakened, it is better to say that the impact was not as big as imagined.
This choice of "removing super anchors" is not a consideration of Dongfang Zhanxuan, but also a general trend in the entire live broadcast e-commerce industry. Simba was banned, Brother Yang retreated behind the scenes, Li Jiaqi trained assistant broadcasters, etc., managers are all aware of the risks of "putting eggs in the same basket".
"For MCN companies, when there is no head anchor, they fantasize about having a head anchor every day. When they have a head anchor, they are very happy at first, but soon after, the boss basically can't sleep." Li Hao concluded, "Any business model that uses people as its core asset is not that stable."
It can be said that the separation of the family relieved Yu Minhong, and the same applies to Dong Yuhui.
Yu Minhong got rid of his dependence on top anchors and turned to more controllable paths such as self-operation, supply chain, and membership system; while Dong Yuhui also withdrew from the original "selling goods" and gradually established his own business narrative.
This separation has caused a lot of speculation and controversy. Yu Minhong also wrote that the complex external and internal environment they faced will not only put the company's operations into trouble, but also cause harm to the long-term development of individuals and the company.
Now it seems that the separation did not bring about a collapse. They may regret the departure of both parties, but based on their long-term considerations, they will certainly not regret their control over the company and freedom of content.