Xu Yang, CEO of the ANTA brand, has stepped down, bringing an end to the aggressive retail experiment | Exclusive

By He Zhexin, Ren Cairu

Edited by Qiao Qian

36Kr has exclusively learned that Xu Yang, CEO of the ANTA brand, is set to step down from his position.

ANTA Group responded to 36Kr, stating that Xu Yang, the former CEO of the ANTA brand, has resigned from his post for family reasons. The Group has approved his resignation and will arrange a new position for him within the organization. Lai Shixian, Executive Director and Co-CEO of ANTA Group, will act as the CEO of the ANTA brand with immediate effect. The established long-term development strategy of the ANTA brand remains unchanged. ANTA Group boasts a comprehensive organizational and business management system, continuously recruiting top global talents to empower the ANTA brand in its dedicated focus on mass sports, creating greater value for consumers.

Prior to Xu Yang, the CEO position of the ANTA brand was successively held by Ding Shizhong, Zheng Jie, and Wu Yonghua, all of whom had a background in sales. Xu Yang is the first leader in the brand's history with a marketing background: he joined ANTA in 2006 as an advertising professional from a 4A agency, and later served as Director of the Brand Management Center and General Manager of the Basketball Division. In 2019, he was appointed General Manager of Arc'teryx Greater China, where over four years he grew Arc'teryx's China business from around 800 million yuan to nearly 3 billion yuan, and expanded its membership base from 14,000 to 1.7 million, cementing his reputation as a high-performing leader.

At the beginning of 2023, ANTA completed its largest organizational restructuring since going public. With his proven track record at Arc'teryx, Xu Yang returned to take the helm as CEO of the ANTA brand.

During his three-year tenure, the ANTA brand failed to meet the growth targets he had initially set, which is likely the direct reason for his departure. As a single core brand, ANTA has long contributed 40%-50% of the Group's total revenue, serving as its most critical revenue pillar.

In October 2023, at the ANTA Investor Day, Xu Yang put forward a target he himself acknowledged as "aggressive": to maintain a 10%-15% compound annual growth rate in ANTA brand's total transaction volume from 2023 to 2026. In an interview with *China Entrepreneur* in early 2025, he even stated ambitiously that "ANTA will surge far ahead of its rivals by 2025" and that "the ANTA single brand will surpass Nike in China within three years".

The reality has proven far more challenging. In 2024, the ANTA brand recorded a revenue of 33.52 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 10.6%, which only hit the lower end of the target range. In 2025, its revenue reached 34.75 billion yuan, with the growth rate plummeting to 3.7%. The gross margin and operating profit margin decreased by 0.9 and 0.3 percentage points respectively. In the first quarter of 2026, the ANTA brand only achieved "high single-digit" growth.

As the three-year cycle enters its final year, there is almost no possibility of fulfilling the original growth targets.

After taking office, Xu Yang strongly promoted the strategy of "downsizing ANTA's business focus", with the core idea of separating online and offline scenarios: online channels mainly sell basic products, while offline channels completely break the uniform "one-size-fits-all" store model, reshaping terminal experiences through category and business format innovation. He proposed closing stores with low sales per square meter, driving the "average customer transaction value to exceed 800 yuan", and summarized this direction as "mass market positioning, brand upgrading". At the operational level, Xu Yang intensively incubated a variety of new store formats and sub-brands, including ANTA Champion, Super ANTA, SV, ARENA & PALACE, and ANTA Zero, attempting to lead ANTA out of the traditional "county-level distribution channels" and into core commercial districts and trend-setting landmarks. At that time, he publicly stated his willingness to "tolerate short-term losses from new businesses".

This retail experiment entered the adjustment phase before it could be fully validated. As previously exclusively disclosed by Gaze and later confirmed to *Jiemian News* by ANTA, the SV Division has been dissolved and integrated into the ANTA Brand Lifestyle Footwear Product Division. Super ANTA will stop its rapid store expansion in 2026 and enter an adjustment period, "continuing to operate at its current scale at least for 2026".

ANTA Champion was once regarded as a breakthrough in the outdoor sports category, but its store opening pace fell far short of expectations, and some of its stores have been converted back to the general store format. ARENA & PALACE, positioned as a high-end trend concept, only opened experimental stores in a few cities such as Chengdu and Shanghai. Currently, its "sales per square meter is not satisfactory", and it has never developed a replicable business model. The ANTA Zero zero-carbon concept store remains largely at the ESG narrative level, contributing very little to actual revenue. Overall, most of these new business formats are still in the stage of high investment and weak self-sustainability, far from being able to independently generate profits.

According to ANTA employees, the brand's current profit source still mainly relies on full-price stores. Among the aforementioned new business formats, the SV model is "particularly poor", and the problem with Super ANTA is that "its stores are too large, leading to low sales per square meter" and it "has cannibalized the business of full-price stores". They estimated that the inventory clearance for these two channels will be completed within this year.

ANTA has long relied on a huge dealer network to expand its business. "Any innovation must first gain the buy-in of dealers". However, Xu Yang was not adept at the close, brother-like collaborative relationships with dealers, which made the implementation of his reforms extremely difficult. Taking Super ANTA as an example, an insider commented: "The idea was good, but when it came to the new store format, there were no new teams to manage it, nor were there truly matching new products."

The aforementioned employee also mentioned that innovation is indeed what ANTA needs but no one has dared to try, and before Xu Yang, "no one was willing to carry out store innovation".

The basketball business, which once made Xu Yang famous, also failed to become a new growth driver during his tenure.

After taking office, Xu Yang once elevated the basketball business to a strategic priority. Signing NBA star Kyrie Irving and promoting overseas expansion were regarded as the landmark moves of his tenure. ANTA internally follows a "horse race" mechanism, where the design of the Irving 1 product was submitted simultaneously by the Chinese team and the US team, and the US team's design was ultimately selected. However, the domestic supply chain coordination failed to keep pace, resulting in the production cycle being "compressed from the normal 8 months to 4 months". The US team only completed two rounds of production communication before the product was rushed to market, and the market response fell short of expectations. Since the signing, the Irving series has only launched two flagship products, failing to generate sufficient market buzz or sales scale. 36Kr has also learned that the Curry contract, which was "already in the product design stage" earlier, was also led and promoted by Xu Yang. ANTA offered a bid as high as 70 million US dollars, but it was ultimately called off by Ding Shizhong. The background for the shelving of this contract is the overall decline of ANTA's basketball business. According to brokerage tracking of e-commerce platform data, the sales of ANTA basketball shoes in the third quarter of 2025 were only about 50 million yuan, far lower than categories such as running shoes, casual shoes, and skate shoes, and "the decline is still accelerating, outpacing the industry average".

With an annual revenue of over 80 billion yuan, ANTA Group has proven its systematic capabilities in operational efficiency, supply chain management, and channel development. Through the integration of Amer Sports and the continuous growth of brands such as Descente and Kolon Sport, it has also demonstrated huge potential in brand incubation and global layout. However, returning to the core ANTA brand itself, the challenges it faces seem to have come full circle: how to find a sustainable balance path between large-scale growth and brand power upgrading, and between the dealer system and direct-sale innovation.

Xu Yang's departure may mean that the ANTA brand will temporarily bid farewell to aggressive retail experiments, and return to the "era of efficiency", leveraging ANTA's strengths in in-depth channel development and supply chain advantages to steadily consolidate the foundation of its core brand business.