Haidilao’s founder Zhang Yong has stepped back into the top role as the hot‑pot chain confronts slowing growth and the early stages of a multi‑brand diversification strategy. On January 13 the company announced that CEO Gou Yiqun had resigned and Zhang would retake day‑to‑day leadership, prompting an immediate market response: Hong Kong shares opened sharply higher and closed up 9.15% at HK$15.74, lifting the group’s market value to about HK$87.7 billion.
The shake‑up also reshuffled the board. Executive directors Song Qing and Gao Jie quit the board, while four new senior executives—Li Nanna (38), Zhu Yinhua (44), Jiao Defeng (39) and Zhu Xuanyi (35)—were appointed. The newcomers, all women, are drawn from regional operations, product and supply‑chain management and group strategy support, and bring extensive frontline experience in store operations and product innovation.
The departing executives will not disappear. Gou will lead two new internal committees—Entrepreneurship & Innovation and Digital Operations—and will focus on automating and digitizing management processes, while Song will remain as chair of the group product committee. The restructuring signals an attempt to balance a founder’s return with continuity in the company’s operational and innovation agenda.
Zhang’s comeback is part tactical, part symbolic. He had publicly mapped out a 10–15 year succession plan about six years ago, and the company has since undergone several leadership experiments: an aggressive expansion that produced a heavy loss of RMB 4.163 billion in 2021; a retrenchment and store rationalization led by Yang Lijuan’s “Woodpecker Plan”; and later a pivot toward incubating new concepts under the “Red Pomegranate” initiative.
The business performance driving the change is mixed. Haidilao’s brand revenue for the first half of 2025 fell to RMB 20.7 billion, down 3.7% year‑on‑year, while net profit dropped 13.7% to RMB 1.76 billion. Same‑store sales slid nearly 9.7%, turnaround frequency eased to 3.8 times per day, and footfall declined by roughly five million customers. Meanwhile the Red Pomegranate incubator, launched in August 2024, has produced 14 new dining brands and generated about RMB 597 million in revenue—an impressive growth rate but still only 2.9% of group turnover.
The market environment helps explain the urgency. The domestic hot‑pot and broader F&B sectors are saturated and volatile: in 2025 some 165,000 hot‑pot outlets opened while 192,000 closed, a net loss of 27,000 outlets as competition stiffened and weaker operators exited. In such a contested landscape Haidilao’s core model is bumping against growth ceilings, and its secondary brands have yet to mature into a dependable second growth engine.
Zhang’s return mirrors a familiar pattern in Chinese and global corporate life: founders often reappear to steady a ship at inflection points. Past examples include Lenovo’s Liu Chuanzhi, Lao Gan Ma’s Tao Bihua, and international cases such as Howard Schultz’s repeated returns to Starbucks. The aim is twofold: restore belief among staff and investors, and speed decision‑making to shrink costly experimentation cycles. But re‑appointment is not a guaranteed fix; scaling new brands, modernizing operations and navigating an intensely competitive domestic market will require both bold strategy and disciplined execution.