After Dong Yuhui Left, East Buy Finally Stopped Paying the Superstar Tax
East Buy's first annual results since star streamer Dong Yuhui left show net profit up almost 87-fold, and Weibo is reading the turnaround as proof that the moat was never the face.
The business press reduced East Buy's year to one number: 86.8 times. That is how much net profit grew for the Chinese live-commerce company in its first full fiscal year after Dong Yuhui, its most persuasive on-air voice, walked out the door. For a lot of Weibo users, the arithmetic landed as a kind of revenge on the entire super-star system.
East Buy's results, published last Thursday for the year ending May 31, show revenue up 29.8 percent to 5.70 billion yuan. Strip out the "Time with Yuhui" stream that followed Dong after his exit, and the company actually grew 36.3 percent. Operating profit swung from a loss of 110 million yuan the previous year to a gain of 663 million yuan. Net profit rose from 6.19 million yuan to 544 million. The headline on Weibo put the message bluntly: after Dong left, East Buy stopped losing money.
Two threads run through the commentary. The first is the exodus itself: four more of the channel's marquee hosts — Mingming, Tianquan, Zhongcan and Linlin — announced their departures within a few days of each other in April. In the earlier folklore of Chinese livestreaming, losing five famous faces in two years should have been a funeral. Instead the company added anchors rather than mourned them, with a plan to expand its host team beyond a hundred people.
The second, more structural thread is what the money is now made of. East Buy's own-brand goods crossed half of gross merchandise volume for the first time, reaching 52.6 percent. Total GMV grew 36.4 percent to 10.2 billion yuan. The transformation is familiar to anyone who has watched a creator economy mature: the stream is no longer the product; the private-label supply chain is.
"East Buy finally stopped working for a top anchor and started working for the brand," one widely shared post summarized. That is the cleanest reading of the year. A super-star host was a cost as much as an asset — a "traffic tax," as another commenter called it, paid in eight-figure salaries and in the specific risk that one personality can walk off with the audience. Shedding that tax did not collapse the business; it clarified it.
Put differently, China's live-commerce boom has spent a decade insisting that the face is the inventory. East Buy's rebound is evidence for the unglamorous counter-case: what survives the star is a warehouse, a label and a customer who came back for the groceries rather than the monologue.