In the post-Dong Yuhui era, East Buy has evolved into three distinct development paths.

Yu Minhong vs. the "Alliance of Departed Employees"?

More than half a year after Sun Dongxu, former CEO of East Buy, left his position, he has started a new business with his former colleagues Mingming and Tianquan, establishing a new company.

Tianyancha information shows that on July 10, "Beautiful Tomorrow (Beijing) Technology Co., Ltd." was registered with a registered capital of 10 million yuan. There are three shareholders in total: Sun Dongxu, Shi Ming (Mingming), and Guo Tianquan (Tianquan).

They hold 34%, 33%, and 33% of the shares respectively. Among them, Sun Dongxu is the largest shareholder, and also serves as the legal representative, manager, director, and person in charge of finance.

Former Members of Yu Minhong's Team Establish a New Company

All three were once core backbones of East Buy.

As the soul figure who built East Buy from scratch, Sun Dongxu was Yu Minhong's most crucial comrade-in-arms during New Oriental's transformation. He took the lead in setting up East Buy's early supply chain, operation system, private-label product matrix, and paid membership system.

Yu Minhong once publicly commented: "Without Dongxu's hard work and indomitable perseverance, there would be no development of East Buy as we know it today."

Mingming and Tianquan were once members of East Buy's top-stream "F4", taking on the heavy responsibility of driving live room traffic after Dong Yuhui went independent. However, they collectively left the company in April this year. In the widely shared post they released at the time, they attributed their departure to drastic changes in corporate culture after the new management took over, which made it impossible for them to adapt, leading to anxiety and internal friction.

No one expected that Sun Dongxu would bring the two together again several months later. Judging from the new company's business scope and official updates, their core business remains live-stream e-commerce sales.

This means they will directly compete with Yu Minhong's East Buy, and even Dong Yuhui's "With Hui".

Many people believe that these core departed employees have formed a "Frustrated Alliance", following the path of "With Hui", which is seen as a backstab against Yu Minhong.

As their former employer, Yu Minhong has been remarkably generous, taking no measures to suppress them, pursuing no accountability, and not using non-compete agreements to block their career paths.

He stated that it is reasonable for former employees to deepen their expertise in familiar fields: "After these old employees leave, they naturally need to make a living. There are only two sectors they know best: one is the education and training industry, and the other is agricultural product live-stream e-commerce."

He also revealed that New Oriental has almost no strict non-compete restrictions except for core sensitive positions. Over the past 30 years, thousands of practitioners have left New Oriental's education and training business, many of whom founded their own companies and even took them public, yet New Oriental itself has not collapsed and continues to develop steadily.

What Yu Minhong said is true: Sun Dongxu's Beautiful Tomorrow and Dong Yuhui's With Hui both grew out of his early experiments in live-stream e-commerce.

With Sun Dongxu starting his new venture, the ideological differences over "traffic IPs" and "product supply chains" that once gave Yu Minhong headaches have finally split into three distinct paths, forming a "tripartite confrontation" pattern.

Three Paths Evolved from East Buy

Many people may not have imagined that the three forces shaping the development of the live-stream sales industry all originated from New Oriental, a company that entered this field as a cross-industry player.

Today, East Buy has become more focused and aligned with Yu Minhong's original vision; With Hui still holds its position as a top-tier live stream; and Beautiful Tomorrow is gearing up for full-scale operations.

The three distinct sales models they have developed represent the three mainstream survival strategies in the current live-stream e-commerce landscape.

Dong Yuhui's "With Hui": The Super Individual Model of Extreme Personal IP

Dong Yuhui's "With Hui" follows the underlying logic of the super individual model adopted by top creators like Crazy Little Yang and Li Jiaqi. It does not rely on heavy assets, build extensive supply chains, or maintain a complex team structure. Instead, it fully leverages Dong Yuhui's personal IP to operate a lightweight "personality-driven sales" business.

The explosive power of this model is clearly visible. After several top-tier live streamers stepped down or withdrew from the public eye, With Hui quickly rose to the ranks of the top live streams.

For example, based on the minimum number of orders processed, With Hui's total live-stream sales in 2025 have exceeded 21 billion yuan, with over 210 million units sold.

Dong Yuhui has rightfully earned the title of Douyin's top sales streamer, becoming the "20-Billion-Yuan Sales Man". This achievement stems from the full maturity of his personal positioning, operational system, and product structure.

In the early days after With Hui became independent, Dong Yuhui hesitated between being a "knowledge streamer" and a "sales streamer", repeatedly expressing sentiments like "I really hate selling things" and "I don't enjoy this job".

At present, he has made peace with himself and fully embraced his role, not only becoming a more professional sales streamer but also evolving into a competent team manager.

For example, he actively engages in dynamic interactions with other streamers in the live room, negotiates prices with brands, and builds a public persona that "fights for consumers' interests". He also consciously expands his personal IP influence by appearing on variety shows, releasing singles, and hosting concerts, diverting off-platform traffic to his live stream.

On the operational front, With Hui has moved past the chaotic early days of a makeshift team, establishing standardized operational procedures and upgrading its product structure.

For instance, during the 2025 Double 11 shopping festival, Dong Yuhui's team followed a set of standardized processes across pre-event promotion, "shopping mall" scene setup, exclusive pre-sale sessions, and order guidance, ensuring the smooth operation of the entire major sales event.

At the same time, his live stream initially focused on low-priced food and beverages with an average order value of 50 to 100 yuan. In 2025, smart home products became the top category, accounting for 19% of total sales, and the average order value rose to 100 to 200 yuan, directly boosting the average sales per live session.

Dong Yuhui and Yu Minhong before full independence: Screenshot from video

The super IP model also has inherent structural flaws: a light-asset model inevitably comes with supply chain weaknesses. "With Hui" primarily relies on influencer-selected products and third-party suppliers, resulting in relatively weak bargaining power in the supply chain. This makes it difficult for the live stream to fundamentally avoid product-related issues.

Previous public controversies involving mooncake quality issues and health product disputes were essentially caused by supply chain failures.

All these risks depend entirely on Dong Yuhui's personal ability to resolve. He is the only traffic magnet for With Hui; if his public persona loses credibility, the entire team will fall into crisis.

In other words, Dong Yuhui's most critical challenge is to avoid becoming the next Crazy Little Yang or Wei Ya.

Sun Dongxu's "Beautiful Tomorrow": The Team-Based, Supply Chain-Driven Agency Model

Compared with Dong Yuhui, Sun Dongxu is following a standard "industrialized team" path.

Having experienced the tensions between professional managers, business owners, and top streamers, he understands better than anyone the pros and cons of the super individual model and the private-label model.

"Beautiful Tomorrow" has cleverly adopted a middle path: eliminating reliance on a single individual, and building a replicable, sustainable team-based business system.

In terms of planning, "Beautiful Tomorrow" follows a classic iron-triangle partnership model, with people at its core.

Sun Dongxu oversees the back end, responsible for overall strategy, platform operations, and supply chain construction, addressing fundamental business gaps; streamers like Mingming and Tianquan lead the front end, handling content creation, live room interactions, and capturing public domain traffic. The management, operations, and content teams each perform their own duties and complement each other, theoretically forming a complete closed loop.

If this model does not deviate from the course set by Sun Dongxu due to a sudden viral rise of a single streamer (as happened with East Buy when Dong Yuhui became famous), its advantages are obvious.

First, risks are diversified, avoiding the scenario of "all suffering when one part fails". Team streamers each have distinct personal brands, creating more diverse traffic sources, so fluctuations involving one individual will not affect the overall business.

Second, the governance structure is stable. The new company has a balanced shareholding structure with mutual checks and balances, allowing collective decision-making on major issues while having someone who can make final calls. At the same time, Sun Dongxu has fully replicated East Buy's mature private-label supply chain logic, controlling product selection, pricing, and supply from the source, using systematic supply chain capabilities to mitigate the risks associated with super individuals.

Simply put, Dong Yuhui earns money through "personal charm", while Sun Dongxu earns money through "team capabilities and supply chain strength". The former relies on natural talent, while the latter relies on a structured system.

Of course, this model also has obvious shortcomings: the lack of a phenomenal super IP makes traffic acquisition more difficult and costly.

In the live-stream industry, super IPs come with free organic traffic and public attention, while regular team-based live streams can only obtain traffic through operational tactics, platform rule adjustments, and paid promotions. In an era where public domain traffic dividends are fading, this traffic acquisition strategy will undoubtedly significantly increase operational costs.

Additionally, a balanced shareholding governance structure has notable advantages in the early startup phase, fostering strong team cohesion and efficient decision-making. However, as the company expands and its business grows, it can easily face blurred responsibilities and slow decision-making. Once disputes over interests or strategy arise, the company may easily fall into a decision-making deadlock.

Yu Minhong's "East Buy": The De-Headliner Heavy-Asset Retail Ecosystem Model

Since East Buy was founded, Yu Minhong has been continuously adjusting its direction.

After going through painful experiences such as the separation of top streamers, the departure of comrades-in-arms, and public backlash, his "most profound realization" about live-stream e-commerce is: sales driven by people is a temporary dividend, while sales driven by products is the foundation. Pure traffic-focused business is always passive; only by controlling products and supply chains can a company gain industry influence.

East Buy has more firmly returned to Yu Minhong's original vision: completely eliminating reliance on top streamers, investing heavily in supply chains, building an online-offline retail ecosystem, and replicating the Sam's Club model.

To this end, East Buy has fully focused on developing private-label products, establishing a complete supply chain system covering production, warehousing, logistics, and after-sales services. It has also launched a paid membership program and opened offline supermarkets, stabilizing its core business through repeat customer purchases.

This heavy-asset retail model has been implemented even more resolutely under the new CEO. This veteran with 19 years of experience at New Oriental explicitly stated that East Buy "aims to become an online version of Sam's Club, not an MCN."

According to public media reports, he has introduced military-style management, reduced top streamers' prime-time exposure, adjusted revenue-sharing ratios, and accelerated the expansion of the streamer team, attempting to replace personality-driven traffic with a systematic supply chain.

This has also transformed East Buy's early "humanistic" characteristics. When the brand, supply chain, warehousing, and logistics systems are all fully established, East Buy will no longer need to invest energy in competing for live stream traffic, evolving into a "sustainable retail brand".

East Buy's private-label products in offline supermarkets Photo by Tang Chen

This may also help Yu Minhong overcome the "most difficult challenge in 30 years". In a long essay reviewing 2024, he wrote: "With all these incidents happening, East Buy was like a powder keg. Frankly, if I had known that running East Buy would cause so many distressing problems, I would never have launched this business."

However, this path also comes with the highest costs. Heavy-asset investment means extremely high trial-and-error costs and a long payback period. Building in-house supply chains, establishing warehousing systems, refining private-label products, and expanding offline stores all require massive capital and time investment.

After separating from its top streamer's traffic, East Buy will inevitably face short-term pain points such as declining traffic, fluctuating performance, and profit pressure. These are necessary costs for transformation.

More critically, New Oriental has deep roots in education and training for many years, and its team excels at content creation and educational output, but lacks operational experience in the retail industry. Shifting from an education and training mindset or live-stream mindset to a retail mindset inherently creates adaptation issues.

Furthermore, the online retail sector is already crowded with major players: Sam's Club, Costco, traditional supermarket chains, and leading e-commerce platforms are all deeply entrenched in the market. As a cross-industry entrant, East Buy faces extremely intense competitive pressure.

In the Second Half of Live-Stream E-Commerce, Three Paths Witness Industry Evolution

Many people enjoy debating with a gossipy mindset: whose path is stronger, Yu Minhong's, Dong Yuhui's, or Sun Dongxu's? Whose choice is more correct? How will Yu Minhong counter the "East Buy Departed Employees Alliance" formed by Beautiful Tomorrow and With Hui?

In reality, these three paths are fundamentally the result of the evolution of the live-stream e-commerce industry. As I previously analyzed, live-stream sales remain a profitable business, a massive market worth trillions of yuan.

However, the underlying business logic has undergone fundamental changes. The saying "super top streamers come and go, but Douyin remains" may soon become a thing of the past.

Live-stream sales are still one of the most efficient ways to convert e-commerce traffic. Through immersive scene presentation and streamers' emotional guidance, consumers can understand products faster and make purchasing decisions more easily. While this is not a groundbreaking model innovation, "products finding consumers" can still accurately match supply and demand.

Currently, platforms like Douyin E-Commerce, Taobao Live, and Kuaishou E-Commerce are refining the business logic of live-stream e-commerce. The industry has moved past the "wild growth" phase, where the extensive model of burning money on paid promotions is no longer viable.

Data reports show that China's live-stream e-commerce market grew by 8.31% year-on-year in 2024, a significant slowdown from previous growth rates. This indicates that the live-stream sales industry has transitioned from a "traffic dividend era" to a "stock competition era".

Major sales platforms can no longer simply pursue traffic scale, but must shift their entire business ecosystem to prioritize quality, efficiency, and long-term value.

According to data from the "2025 Live-Stream E-Commerce Industry White Paper", the share of total sales generated by top streamers has been declining year by year. In 2025, top streamers accounted for only 10.66% of total GMV, while mid-tier and small streamers' GMV share rose to 89.34%.

Against this backdrop, Dong Yuhui may be the last super top streamer. Live-stream sales will eventually evolve into a competition centered around products and supply chains.

However, in the present and for a considerable period in the future, the three paths will coexist. Fans will empty their shopping carts in live streams because they adore the streamers; consumers will also choose agency-run live streams and brand-owned live streams, and opt for online and offline purchases, based on long-term trust.

This evolution originating from East Buy, or more precisely from Yu Minhong, is not just a drama of personal conflicts between business colleagues. It represents