The ironclad Dong Mingzhu, the fleeting Meng Yutong

Recently, Meng Yutong posted forty photos in a row on social platforms. The leading one is a no-makeup photo of her with Dong Mingzhu, with the caption: "Called back by my boss with one click, I'm back in Zhuhai. Everything feels so familiar and warm."

This trip was to accompany Dong Mingzhu for her 72nd birthday. Meng Yutong publicly thanked Dong Mingzhu, saying that Dong Mingzhu "has been guiding me whenever I am confused, and always thinks about me and wants to help me." It is hard to believe that the two once had a public falling out. Celebrity dramas always attract traffic, especially Dong Mingzhu, who is a natural trending search magnet.

The news of the mentor and apprentice reconciling dominated the trending search list soon. Some warm-hearted netizens sighed that "the best workplace narrative is mutual dedication", while others with a rational mindset glanced at the calendar and teased, "Isn't the Double 11 coming soon?", and the joke of "one click to start the live-stream sales mode" flooded the comment section.

According to Qichacha, the holder of the "Meng Yutong" trademark is still Gree Electric Appliances, Inc. of Zhuhai to this day. 45 related joint trademarks such as "Yutong", "Mingzhu" and "Mingzhu Yutong" have also been registered by Gree, covering multiple categories including advertising sales, daily chemical products, and furniture.

There is no such thing as "people leave and tea cools". At Gree, three years after Meng Yutong left, her name is still an asset of the company.

The focus of this warm birthday companionship is not on warmth itself. In the five-year-long repeated back-and-forth between Dong Mingzhu and Meng Yutong, Meng Yutong herself may never have been the protagonist.

She is more like a handy traffic "tool". When Gree needs a successor narrative, she is "the second Dong Mingzhu"; when live-stream sales are needed, she is the top host; when the workplace needs to be rectified, she is the negative example of "only wanting to be an internet celebrity"; when traffic needs to pick up, she becomes the "valued cross-generational friend" again.

Solving problems by leveraging personal traffic is, to some extent, Dong Mingzhu's usual practice in recent years. The 72-year-old "Iron Lady" is willing to let go of past grudges, which is closely related to this.

Compared with Gree, consumers' mental impression of Dong Mingzhu is deepening year by year. This business philosophy of turning to personal influence when encountering difficult decisions has formed a thought-provoking resonance with Gree's current development status. On October 26, Gree Electric released its third-quarter financial report. In the first three quarters of 2026, its revenue reached 1260.75 billion yuan, down 8.10% year on year. The net profit attributable to shareholders was 172.74 billion yuan, down 19.51% year on year.

I. Four Scenes in Five Years: The Life Cycle of a Traffic Tool

Back to 2020, the foreshadowing of this birthday celebration had already been laid.

Affected by the "black swan" event, Gree's performance declined in that year, with its first-quarter revenue falling by 49% year on year. Under pressure, 67-year-old Dong Mingzhu walked into the live streaming room, personally overseeing 13 live sessions throughout the year, achieving total sales of 476.2 billion yuan, accounting for 27.93% of Gree's annual revenue that year.

Carrying the quarterly performance with her own efforts, Dong Mingzhu became the focus of the media with the image of a strong woman who "has no regrets for her moves".

However, under the prevailing buzz at that time, some media disclosed that most of the bulk orders in the live streaming room were placed by dealers, aiming to complete the annual sales tasks so as to get rebates and settlement of installation cards.

It is not so much live-stream sales as moving the inventory pressure online.

After the bustle, it once again proved that Gree was in urgent need of a brand new traffic container recognized by consumers rather than dealers at that time. However, the path of cooperating with top external live streamers was not easy.

At that time, live streaming e-commerce was booming, and the stay-at-home trend gave rise to top streamers such as Viya and Li Jiaqi. These streamers asked for high prices, had strong right to speak, and were used to comparing and suppressing prices across the whole network. This naturally conflicts with Gree's traditional dealer system, which features strict price control and multi-layer price markup.

Therefore, this traffic container is best to be young, obedient, malleable, and completely cultivated within the company's own system.

This person soon appeared. In April 2021, the workplace variety show *Newcomers in the Workplace* premiered. Dong Mingzhu selected Meng Yutong, a 22-year-old graduate from Zhejiang University, on camera. Her remark that "I will train her to become the second Dong Mingzhu" instantly turned an ordinary person into the "chosen workplace newcomer".

In November of the same year, the "Mingzhu Yutong Selection" live streaming room opened, and Meng Yutong made her live-stream sales debut: 4 hours, 24 products, 113,000 viewers, with sales of about 620,000 yuan. In December, the two appeared together at the Manufacturing Leaders Summit, and the "successor" narrative was officially announced.

From selecting talents through variety shows to trademark registration, from account naming to appearing together at the summit, a carefully designed star-making project led by Dong Mingzhu, accompanied by Meng Yutong and supported by Gree was slowly launched. In the following days, Gree successfully completed the "growth-oriented star" narrative with workplace reality shows, frequently created hot topics with the "successor" persona, and then used the live streaming room to realize traffic monetization. As for what Meng Yutong herself was suitable for, no one ever gave a serious answer.

Meng Yutong's commercial value has been tightly bound to the name "Dong Mingzhu" since her first day of employment. However, her actual sales conversion data does not seem to meet Gree's expectations.

In the first week of the "Mingzhu Yutong Selection" live streaming room, the total sales counted by third-party statistics were less than 100,000 yuan. As for the young-oriented small home appliances strongly recommended by Meng Yutong, only 16 desktop air purifiers and 492 humidifiers were sold.

Based on such sales performance, the monthly sales of the account are at most between 10 million yuan and 25 million yuan, which is only 300 million yuan a year at the upper limit. Compared with Gree's tens of billions of annual sales, this is nothing more than a drop in the bucket.

In 2022, Meng Yutong gradually faded out of the live streaming room, and the account avatar was quietly changed from the group photo of the two to a solo photo of Dong Mingzhu.

In May 2023, Meng Yutong left her job to work on self-media, and quickly gained a large number of followers by the label of "former secretary to the Fortune 500 chairman". According to public reports, the quotation for a single advertisement of hers once reached 240,000 to 280,000 yuan.

Dong Mingzhu's subsequent series of responses made the onlookers eat enough gossip.

In August of the same year, Dong Mingzhu satirized that "some people eat from the bowl while staring at the pot"; in November, she added on the show *Finance and Lang Xianping* that "talent cultivation is a joke"; in December, at the 2023 college graduates' onboarding ceremony, Dong Mingzhu said that Meng Yutong could not even write a proper document as a secretary, and stated bluntly that "we can no longer tolerate such a person staying in Gree".

In May 2025, the plot reversed again. Meng Yutong posted that she received a WeChat message from Dong Mingzhu after two years, and Gree's official account left a comment saying "welcome home for dinner". Later, the two appeared in the same live stream, which was called the "century reconciliation" by the public.

In March this year, Meng Yutong said in a variety show that she sent the retuned posters to Dong Mingzhu for "reporting" as soon as possible, and the reply she received was a "cheer up" emoji.

Four scenes in five years, the two have gone through star-making, star-using, star-fading, and recall. In every scene, Meng Yutong's persona can be switched arbitrarily according to Gree's needs. The only constant is that she has always served Gree's corporate narrative.

II. A Traffic Methodology That Can Hardly Be Called Successful

In a narrow sense, Meng Yutong's experience is just a personal workplace ups and downs, but behind it lies Gree's relatively extensive traffic methodology.

In the early stage, Gree did not pay much attention to the rules of the Internet. It was not until 2014 that the company participated in Tmall Double 11 for the first time, with sales of about 130 million yuan on that day, and only sold about 47,000 air conditioners.

Midea Group, another white goods player that has competed with Gree for many years, achieved total online sales of 710 million yuan on Double 11 in 2014. At that time, Dong Mingzhu's attitude towards e-commerce was that it "damaged the real economy".

Now, looking back at the live streaming whose performance was mostly supported by dealers, it is not difficult to find that the direct reason for Gree's entry into live streaming is more attributed to the emergency reform after the sharp drop in revenue in Q1 of that year.

As a result, Gree and Dong Mingzhu, who were forced to enter this field, also tried to use a set of B2B tactics to do C-end business, and use the youth-oriented narrative to support the commercial imagination of the giant's transformation. At that time, the people attracted to the live streaming room by Meng Yutong might be young women who are keen on workplace topics and follow the "rich family secretary" narrative. However, the main products Gree wants to sell are air conditioners with a repurchase cycle of ten years and large home appliances targeting middle-aged and elderly customers.

The obvious mismatch between the persona and the product portfolio naturally leads to the difficulty of effective traffic precipitation. The direct result is that no matter how hard Meng Yutong tries, it is difficult to sell goods when there is a mismatch between users and products.

If we regard online transformation and live streaming transformation as channel reform, we can refer to the practices of other white goods giants in the same period. Previously, Midea focused on supply chain organization, completed the T+3 reform from 2017 to 2019, and compressed the production and sales cycle to about 12 days; Xiaomi Home is well versed in the drainage method, relying on a wide range of small digital products to maintain customer flow, starting from OEM, and gradually growing into the current full ecosystem covering people, vehicles and homes.

In contrast, from Dong Mingzhu to Meng Yutong and then to Wang Ziru, Gree's thinking has always been the same.

What is more thought-provoking is that after Meng Yutong left, Gree turned to cooperate with live streaming agencies for targeted delivery. In 2023, the effective sales of e-commerce live streaming increased by more than 200% year on year, and the sales data became even more outstanding. This just proves that Meng Yutong herself has never been the key. As for the traffic business, Gree's early understanding mostly stayed at the level of "publicity volume".

Older generation entrepreneurs often have a rare tenacity. They do not care too much about temporary gains and losses, and have almost stubborn persistence in the direction they have identified. This trait can not only become the driving force for the enterprise to go through cycles, but also become the resistance to transformation when the environment changes.

Looking back many years ago, Zhong Shanshan's unwavering courage saved Oriental Leaf, which now dominates the tea drink market. Dong Mingzhu also has her own persistence. Since 2025, Gree has uniformly named its new retail stores "Dong Mingzhu Healthy Home", moving her personal IP from the live streaming room to the storefront sign.

The personalization of brand assets has branded Gree with the "steel stamp" of Dong Mingzhu. When the signs of thousands of stores read "Dong Mingzhu Healthy Home", the corporate brand assets have been transferred to individuals.

Personal IP has depreciation and risks, while brand assets should be permanent. Using a controversial personal symbol to carry hundreds of billions of revenue is no different from linking bulk commodities with consumer goods. This is not an isolated case. At present, cases where excessive personal IPization leads to traffic backlash are already very common.

In addition, the instrumentalized concept of talents is also worthy of attention. Wang Ziru, who was once highly praised by Dong Mingzhu, joined Gree as the head of channel reform, but hardly appeared in public in the following two years. When he appeared in the public eye again, he was caught in various controversies.

In this logic, the value of talents depends more on whether they can create topics for the super IP of "Dong Mingzhu". This is obviously different from the current booming technology companies in the market.

Whether it is corporate executives and entrepreneurs who are good at technology or products, their public images mostly carry clear technical and business marks, such as Yao Shunyu for Tencent, Yang Zhilin for Kimi, and Zhu Mingming for Rokid. Even Lei Jun, who once made a bet with Dong Mingzhu, or Haier and its leader Zhou Yunjie, the focus of public opinion rarely has the "rich family gossip" similar to that of Gree.

III. When "Gree" Is Almost Equivalent to "Dong Mingzhu"

Entrepreneurs can certainly become the most distinctive business card of the enterprise, but as personal stories become more and more popular, the enterprise's own growth story may not be equally wonderful.

Back to the fundamentals, on October 26, Gree Electric released its third-quarter financial report. In the first three quarters of 2026, its revenue reached 1260.75 billion yuan, down 8.10% year on year. The net profit attributable to shareholders was 172.74 billion yuan, down 19.51% year on year. In the first half of 2026, Gree Electric's revenue was 893.98 billion yuan, down 8.15% year on year; the net profit attributable to shareholders was 132.78 billion yuan, down 7.87% year on year. This is already the second consecutive year that Gree's mid-year report revenue has declined.

More importantly, Gree's net cash flow from operating activities in the first half of the year was 188.09 billion yuan, a sharp drop of 33.60% year on year. The official statement says that "cash received from selling goods and providing services has decreased", which translates to fewer people sending payments to the group. This also confirms the media report that Gree dealers even have to pay out of their own pockets to replace the store signs.

In the same period, Gree's revenue from industrial products and green energy was 86.52 billion yuan, down 9.79% year on year, accounting for only 9.68% of the total. The highly anticipated smart equipment revenue was 374 million yuan, less than 0.5% of the total revenue.

This to some extent confirms that after years of efforts in diversification, the second growth curve has never taken shape, and the group is increasingly relying on a single business line. One of the countermeasures Dong Mingzhu has given at this stage to get back on the growth track is to recall Meng Yutong, create trending searches, and squeeze more value from the "Dong Mingzhu" IP.

No matter what kind of friendship there is between the two, at least at this moment, the past disputes have given way to the warmth of reunion after a long separation. For Dong Mingzhu, who is over 70 years old, seeing the younger generation grow up and have their own career is undoubtedly a gratifying thing.

However, after this wave of popularity, the Double 11 carnival will come as usual, and the noise of trending searches will eventually subside. Gree still needs to face the practical propositions of channel reform, new business cultivation, and how to bring more young talents to the front stage.

Over the past 30 years, relying on her tenacity and persistence, Dong Mingzhu has participated in shaping Gree's operating system, and made Gree a business card of China's manufacturing industry. This accumulation will not lose its value due to short-term operating pressure.

Gree does not necessarily need to say goodbye to Dong Mingzhu, but it ultimately needs a growth story that no longer completely relies on Dong Mingzhu