Ordinary people strike it rich on Kuaishou
Print Edition
ON Lu Kaigang’s feed, sheets of tarp are transformed into haute couture as China’s mountainous backdrop becomes his catwalk, a 22-year-old villager sashaying to fame via a video-sharing app for the everyman — Kuaishou.
Lu is one of hundreds of millions of users uploading short clips to the app, which propelled its parent company to a US$5.4 billion initial public offering last week. But while its competitor Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, is famed for trendy and typically urban influencers, Kuaishou reaches a different demographic, lassoing in migrant workers and rural Chinese.
Lu uses his colorful video stream to show how everyday materials can be turned into sophisticated clothing. That traction with a poorer but connected mass market known as tuwei in Chinese, meaning “earthy,” resonated on the Hong Kong stock exchange.
Shares in Kuaishou Technology, whose name means “quick hands,” almost tripled on debut last Friday, bringing the company’s value to US$159 billion.
Kuaishou says it made a conscious decision to channel viewers to less famous content creators. Vice President Yu Jingzhong said last year that 70 percent of Kuaishou’s traffic was allocated to “ordinary people.”
Yu said in the first nine months of 2019, more than 19 million people earned income through Kuaishou, many of them from poverty-stricken counties.
Kuaishou emerged around a decade ago, when investor Fisher Zhang met the company’s founder Cheng Yixiao, a former software engineer and developer at Hewlett-Packard.
At the time, Kuaishou was just a tool for making and sharing GIFs, short animated images.
Zhang found a 2 million yuan (US$309,000) investment and the company was born, he said in a book, “The Power to be Seen: What is Kuaishou.”
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