Shou Zi Chew Steps Down As ByteDance’s CFO, To Focus On Being TikTok’s CEO

Shou Zi Chew, a top executive at video-sharing company TikTok and its parent company ByteDance, will be stepping down from his role as the Chief Financial Officer of ByteDance. According to an internal memo from ByteDance, the CFO will be stepping down from his role as CFO at ByteDance to be able to focus on being TikTok’s CEO.

Shou Zi Chew has had an impressive ride with both TikTok and ByteDance. He joined ByteDance in March from smartphone company Xiaomi where he was the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Xiaomi from 2015 to 2020 and was in charge of the company’s international business wing for a year. Just a few months after, in May, he took on the role of Chief Executive Officer at subsidiary company TikTok. Since then, he has worked tirelessly alongside various teams and executives to bring ByteDance and TikTok to where they presently are.  

The recent development, according to ByteDance’s CEO Liang Rubo, is part of a bigger reorganization of the company. The memo released by the company showed that six business units have been created, all in a bid to maximize the company’s operations. The six units include Douyin, the Chinese version of viral short video-sharing service TikTok and ByteDance’s news aggregation service Toutiao; the second unit is Lark, its work collaboration division; the third is its education business, Dali. The remaining units are BytePlus, Nuverse and TikTok.

The CEO, however, emphasized that the changes will take a gradual transition as the reorganization plan begin to unfold. This is not ByteDance’s first mention of a reorganization strategy. In fact, Shou Zi Chew’s appointment as TikTok’s CEO (alongside Vanessa Pappas’s appointment as COO) was described to be part of a strategic reorganization to maximize the company’s global teams. ByteDance’s co-founder Zhang Yiming also stepped down from his CEO position and was replaced by Liang Rubo, as part of the reorganization strategy of the company.

The reorganization strategy followed the company being tagged a threat to the United States of America by the Donald Trump administration. Since the blacklisting, although the company has been delisted thanks to the Joe Biden administration, the company has had quite rough months. The company has continued to thrive, gaining new users as well as hitting new boundaries.