BEIJING, January 11 (TMTPost)— The most popular livesteamer of East Buy, a subsidiary of Chinese private tutoring giant New Oriental Education and Technology Group , made a good start with a warmly welcomed live commerce under a separate channel.

Credit：Douyin

Yuhuitongxing, a live-steam channel of Dong Yuhui’s personal studio on TikTok’s Chinese sister Douyin, accumulated more than 30 million online viewers in two hours since the sessioin started at 7:00 p.m. January 9. Gross merchandise volume (GMV) of the live-stream topped RMB150 million (US$21 million) in the first three hours. Followers of Yuhuitongxing hit 7.22 million, increasing over 3 million from pre-live-streaming. Within first 20 minutes of the live-stream, Yuhuitongxing received more than 200 million thumb-ups, ranking the first on Douyin’s live sessions that day, while East Buy took the place of around 30th.

The live commerce stream this week marks Yuhuitongxing had a successful debut. It is a latest evidence that how passionate support of dedicated Dong Yuhui’s followers can channel their admiration into sales powerhouse. The controversy last month has highlightedthe incredible impact of Dong’s fans.

The dispute originated from East Buy staff responding on social media on December 6, revealing that all the scripts used for live broadcasts are collaboratively created by the hosts, the content-writing team, filming team and editing team.  The reply irritated Dong’s fans, who insisted what Dong said was his own inspiration and further claimed East Buy downgraded his contribution to live-stream production. The former CEO Sun Dongxu subsequent response and apology made things even worse. Sun noted that Dong's annual salary is more than tens of millions of yuan and expressed a firm stance against the so-called fan culture.

Raging Dong’s fans then called for a boycott of East Buy. A large number of them chose to unfollow the company’s live-stream channel and many rushed to live-stream sessions of its rivals to place orders. On December 8 alone, the live-broadcast session of East Buy’s peer Gaotu Techedu received about 600,000 visitors, up from only 27,000 viewers the previous day. East Buy lost more than 100,000 followers on Douyin platform from December 9 to 13, and its Hong Kong-listed shares plunged more than 19% in the same period.

New Oriental’s management soon took actions to reassure Dong’s fans. East Buy announced on December 16 the removal of Sun Dongxu from the positions of Executive Director and CEO, citing Sun’s mishandling of the inciden hurt the firm’s brand and reputation. A day after the announcement, East Buy promoted Dong Yuhui to senior partner and another day later, New Oriental chairman Yu Minhong, who takes over CEO of East Buy, disclosed the board of directors decided to name Dong Yuhui as chairman assistant and vice president of its subsidiary, New Oriental Tourism. At a live-broadcast event with Dong that day, Yu stressed Dong’s new role will certainly give him the right to speak. “Whatever Dong Yuhui wants to do in the future, as long as I think it is reasonable, I will definitely leverage resources to help him achieve it,” Yu said. In just two days — December 18 and 19 — over 2 million followers returned to East Buy's platform as well as restoring the overall following on its Douyin account to over 30 million, compared with less than 28.5 million on December 16. East Buy’s shares  soared 21.9% in Hong Kong on December 18.

At the live session at Yuhuitongxing channel on January 9 , Yu suggested Dong to live-stream overseas, such as in Australia. Dong said his studio also weighed possibility of such move.