Kuaishou

Kuaishou Technology is a Chinese publicly traded partly state-owned holding company based in Haidian District, Beijing, that was founded in 2011 by Hua Su (宿华) and Cheng Yixiao (程一笑). The company is known for developing a mobile app for sharing users' short videos, a social network, and video special effects editor.

As of 2019, it has a worldwide user base of over 200million, leading the “Most Downloaded” lists of the Google Play and Apple App Store in eight countries, such as Brazil. In Pakistan and Indonesia, this app is known as Snack Video. It is often referred to as "Kwai" in overseas markets. Its main competitor is Douyin, which is known as TikTok outside China.

Kuaishou's overseas team is led by the former CEO of the application 99, and staff from Google, Facebook, Netflix, and TikTok were recruited to lead the company's international expansion.

The China Internet Investment Fund, a state-owned enterprise controlled by the Cyberspace Administration of China, holds a golden share ownership stake in Kuaishou.

History
Kuaishou is China's first short video platform that was developed in 2011 by engineer Hua Su and Cheng Yixiao. Prior to co-founding Kuaishou, Su Hua had worked for both Google and Baidu as a software engineer. The company is headquartered in Haidian District, Beijing.

Kuaishou's predecessor "GIF Kuaishou" was founded in March 2011. GIF Kuaishou was a mobile app with which users could make and share GIF pictures. In November 2012, Kuaishou became a short video community and a platform with which users could record and share videos. By 2013, the app had reached 100 million daily users. By 2019, it had exceeded 200million active daily users.

In March 2017, Kuaishou closed a US$350 million investment round that was led by Tencent. In January 2018, Forbes estimated the company's valuation to be US$18 billion.

In April 2018, Kuaishou's app was briefly banned from Chinese app stores after China Central Television (CCTV) reported on the platform popularizing videos of teenage mothers.

In 2019, the company announced a partnership with the People's Daily, an official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, to help it experiment with the use of artificial intelligence in news.

In June 2020, the Government of India banned Kwai along with 58 other apps, citing "data and privacy issues". The 2020 border tensions between India and China might have also played a role in the ban, there having been an increasingly political "Boycott China" movement in India due to the competitive relations between the two countries in recent years.

In January 2021, Kuaishou announced it was planning an initial public offering (IPO) to raise approximately US$5 billion. Kuaishou's stock completed its first day of trading at $300 Hong Kong dollars (HKD) (US$38.70), more than doubling its initial offer price, and causing its market value to rise to over $1 trillion HKD (US$159 billion).

In February 2021, Kuaishou made a debut on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, with its shares soaring by 194% at the opening. However, the company soon faced significant challenges due to stringent regulatory restrictions on Chinese internet companies, leading to a nearly 80% decline in its share price from its peak post-IPO. By December 2021, Kuaishou announced a major reorganization, including the layoff of 30% of its staff, primarily targeting mid-level employees earning an annual salary of $157,000 or more. This restructuring aimed to cut costs and mitigate financial losses.

In October 2022, state-owned Beijing Radio and Television Station took a minority ownership stake in Kuaishou.

In April 2024, a Financial Times article citing current and former Kuaishou employees stated that the company has been running an ageist redundancy programme known internally as "Limestone", culling workers in their mid-30s.

In June 2024, Kuaishou released its diffusion transformer text-to-video model, Kling, which they claimed could generate two minutes of video at 30 frames per second and in 1080p resolution. The model has been compared to that of OpenAI's Sora text-to-video model. It is accessible to the public on Kuaishou's video editing app KwaiCut via signing up for a waitlist with a Chinese phone number.

Popularity
Compared to its main short video platform competitor Douyin, Kuaishou is more popular with older users who live outside China's Tier 1 cities. Its initial popularity came from videos of Chinese rural life. Kuaishou also relied more on e-commerce revenue than on advertising revenue compared to its main competitor.

Most followed accounts
As of 30 June 2024, the most followed account on the platform is Kuaishou Store with over 200 millions followers. The most followed individual account belongs to Chinese E-commerce businessman Xin Youzhi.