East Buy CEO Sun Jin steps down from the cultural tourism branch, focusing on addressing traffic declines and membership shrinkage triggered by influencer departures.
The mass exodus of anchors in April this year is still sending aftershocks through the boardroom of East Buy. Recent business registration updates from Tianyancha show that the person in charge of Beijing New Oriental Wokaide International Education Travel Co., Ltd.'s Guangdong branch has been changed, with East Buy CEO Sun Jin formally stepping down and Wang Wei taking over. To outsiders, this is just a routine adjustment of an executive's concurrent role. But against the backdrop of Sun Jin having been in office for half a year and core anchors leaving one after another, the significance of this move is entirely different. Sun Jin is a veteran of New Oriental with nineteen years of service, who took over East Buy under urgent circumstances at the end of 2025. His consistent style carries a strong tutoring-industry DNA—tight control, heavy process management, and de-emphasizing top talent. This approach works in classroom management, but it ran straight into a wall in the live-streaming e-commerce ecosystem. In April this year, core anchors Mingming and Tianquan submitted their resignations one after another, with letters of resignation citing mismanagement and a stifling atmosphere. Traffic subsequently saw a cliff-like decline, paid membership numbers shrank significantly, and the brand reputation of self-operated products took a hit. The Wokaide Cultural Tourism Guangdong branch that Sun Jin has now stepped down from is precisely the old territory he oversaw when he led South China. This company mainly operates study tour and travel services, and it was once seen as a testing ground for East Buy to explore a second growth curve. Yielding the legal representative rights of this base means Sun Jin's focus is now completely consolidated at Beijing headquarters to deal with the core crisis triggered by the out-of-control de-emphasis on top talent. Looking through the business structure visible on Tianyancha, there is also another consideration behind this move—risk isolation. The cultural tourism and study tour business involves a large volume of C-end prepayments and refund disputes, and under the current regulatory environment, compliance risks are not low. Through organizational separation, isolating potential litigation from non-core segments away from the financial statements of the e-commerce main business is a fairly pragmatic arrangement. At the end of the day, this is not just a personal retrenchment by Sun Jin, but also a way for all of East Buy to account for itself in mid-2026—after the content ecosystem has been frostbitten, stopping the bleeding must come first before any talk of next steps.
