Sun Dongxu, former CEO of East Buy, has completed the first live broadcast on his new account, and its popularity has surpassed that of Yu Hui Tong Xing.
On August 2, the Douyin account "Beautiful Tomorrow" launched by Sun Dongxu, former CEO of Eastbuy, together with former core hosts Mingming (Shi Ming) and Tianquan (Guo Tianquan), kicked off its first live stream. Half an hour after the broadcast started, the number of real-time online viewers in the live room exceeded 100,000, the real-time popularity value surpassed 7 million, and it topped the overall ranking of Douyin's e-commerce live streaming. In the same time period, the mature account Yu Hui Tong Hang, which has been operating for more than a year, ranked fifth on the list, and its live stream popularity was overtaken by "Beautiful Tomorrow".
Data monitored by the Chanmama platform shows that this live stream lasted from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., with a total live duration of 5 hours, a total of 14.547 million views, more than 300,000 new followers gained throughout the whole broadcast, and the total number of followers of the account reached 947,000 after the live stream ended.
Image source: Chanmama
The account put more than 100 products on the shelves throughout the whole live stream, with core categories covering grain, oil and fresh produce, snack foods, household cleaning and daily necessities, etc. The sales of many single items of snacks and agricultural products exceeded 100,000 yuan, and the estimated total transaction volume of the whole live stream exceeded 10 million yuan. This performance is at the same level as the sales volume of Eastbuy and Yu Hui Tong Hang on August 2.
Image source: Chanmama
However, compared with Eastbuy, the old employer of the three founders of Beautiful Tomorrow, and Yu Hui Tong Hang, Beautiful Tomorrow is still in the initial stage of development, with a large gap in both the number of followers and brand influence. As of August 2, the number of followers of Yu Hui Tong Hang on the Douyin platform was 39.104 million, and the number of followers of the main Eastbuy account was 28.353 million.
Homepages of the Douyin accounts of Beautiful Tomorrow, Yu Hui Tong Hang and Eastbuy
Tianyancha information shows that Beautiful Tomorrow (Beijing) Technology Co., Ltd., which completed industrial and commercial registration on July 10, has a registered capital of 10 million yuan. Sun Dongxu contributed 3.4 million yuan to hold 34% of the shares, and serves as the company's legal representative, manager and person in charge of finance; Mingming and Tianquan each contributed 3.3 million yuan, holding 33% of the shares respectively, with an almost equally distributed equity structure and no absolute controlling shareholder.
The company's name hides the personal identifiers of the three founders: "Meili" (Beautiful) is taken from the netizens' previous nickname for Sun Dongxu, "Sun Meili", and "Mingtian" (Tomorrow) extracts one character each from the names of Mingming and Tianquan.
On July 13, the day when the Beautiful Tomorrow account was registered, the three released their first joint official announcement video. Two hours after this short video was launched, the number of new followers of the account exceeded 80,000, and three days after its launch, the number of followers of the account exceeded 330,000, accumulating basic traffic for the first live stream in advance.
The three have all had close ties with Eastbuy before. Sun Dongxu officially stepped down from all management positions in Eastbuy in November 2025, and the core trigger for his resignation was the internal management conflict caused by the "Little Essay Incident".
Regarding Sun Dongxu's resignation, Yu Minhong once stated publicly at that time, "Dongxu and I are the founders of Eastbuy. Without Dongxu's efforts and perseverance, there would be no development and today of Eastbuy." Yu Minhong said that he maintains very good communication with Sun Dongxu, and there is no estrangement or gap between them.
While Mingming, Tianquan and two other hosts Zhongcan and Linlin announced their resignation simultaneously on April 25, 2026. Mingming and Tianquan were once members of the first-generation "F4" host group of Eastbuy. At that time, Mingming had 1.3 million existing followers on his personal Douyin account, and Tianquan, as a host in the initial stage of the platform, had nearly 500,000 private domain followers.
The core reason for the resignation of the above-mentioned hosts points to the operation adjustment after the change of the platform's management. After Eastbuy replaced its executive president, it implemented a strong control reform, compressed the prime live streaming time slots of veteran hosts, adjusted the assessment and revenue sharing rules for hosts, fully shifted to the self-operated product-driven model, and weakened the humanistic live streaming content.
Talking about the collective departure of core hosts, Yu Minhong once publicly apologized for the trouble caused by the relevant personnel changes to users, fans and the team, and said that the four hosts are excellent employees who grew up with the platform, and their departure is a loss to the platform.
After the establishment of Beautiful Tomorrow, Yu Minhong publicly stated again: "After these old employees leave, they naturally need to make a living, and the only two tracks they are most familiar with are the education and training industry, and live e-commerce for agricultural and sideline products. These two tracks were first developed step by step by me leading New Oriental."
He also pointed out that New Oriental basically does not set non-compete agreements except for core sensitive positions, and employees can engage in similar businesses the very next day after resignation.
According to Yu Minhong's disclosure, over the past 30 years, the education and training business of New Oriental has also produced thousands of practitioners, many of whom have founded enterprises and even made them go public, but New Oriental itself has not collapsed because of this, and still maintains steady development. He also publicly sent his blessings, wishing Sun Dongxu, Mingming and Tianquan a smooth entrepreneurial journey.
At present, Eastbuy, Yu Hui Tong Hang and Beautiful Tomorrow have obviously become competitors. Among them, Eastbuy relies on its mature self-operated supply chain and offline store layout to take the route of a comprehensive platform, which weakens the personal influence of individual hosts and implements the de-head strategy. Yu Hui Tong Hang is bound to Dong Yuhui's personal cultural IP, giving consideration to books, cultural tourism and high-end agricultural products, and frequently cooperates with cultural tourism departments across the country, with strong cross-circle communication capabilities. At this stage, the followers of Beautiful Tomorrow are mainly old audiences of Eastbuy and the existing private domain followers of the three hosts, with a relatively narrow circle. It focuses on affordable daily necessities in rigid demand, and retains the slow-paced knowledge explanation content.
Some analysts believe that the reason why the first live stream of Beautiful Tomorrow overtook Yu Hui Tong Hang in popularity is related to the industry popularity of Sun Dongxu as the first-generation operator of Eastbuy, the private domain followers accumulated by Mingming and Tianquan for many years as hosts, and the public opinion topic traffic brought by the three collectively leaving their jobs to start a business. Short-term emotional traffic can quickly push up the ranking, but traffic conversion, user retention and supply chain capabilities are the core thresholds for long-term competition.
Whether Beautiful Tomorrow can continue the popularity of its first live stream and truly grow into the third pole that can stand up to the two top accounts still needs to be answered by the market and time.
This article is from Jiemian News, reporter: Song Jianan, published with authorization from 36Kr.