Byte PICO management reshuffle: Tech expert Li Xiaokai takes over, bidding farewell to the era of expansion

On July 21, PICO, the XR (Extended Reality) business under ByteDance, completed its core management transition.

Specifically, PICO founder Zhou Hongwei will no longer serve as the head of the business due to personal plans, with Li Xiaokai taking over the position, fully responsible for PICO’s subsequent business development. Wall Street News has confirmed the above personnel changes with sources close to ByteDance.

With Zhou Hongwei stepping down, PICO has officially bid farewell to the founder-led management phase.

Public information shows that Zhou Hongwei graduated from Harbin Institute of Technology in his early years and worked at hardware manufacturing company Goertek for nearly ten years, accumulating extensive experience in hardware R&D and supply chain management.

In 2015, as the domestic VR industry began to emerge, Zhou Hongwei founded PICO, focusing on the VR all-in-one market. Under his leadership, PICO established a first-mover advantage in consumer hardware, long maintaining a leading market share domestically.

In the second half of 2021, ByteDance completed the acquisition of PICO for approximately 9 billion RMB. This transaction enabled PICO to gain support from ByteDance in terms of funding, user traffic, and content distribution ecosystem.

After entering the ByteDance system, Zhou Hongwei continued to lead the business line and promoted the iteration of core products such as the PICO 4. Passing the baton at this time marks the completion of his phase guiding PICO from a startup into integration within a major corporation.

Li Xiaokai, who succeeds Zhou Hongwei as the head, has a strong background in fundamental technology.

Information shows that Li Xiaokai graduated from Zhejiang University, then earned a PhD from Yale University, with core research focused on optoelectronic materials and devices. After joining ByteDance, he accumulated years of experience in R&D and management in consumer electronics and hardware products.

As the capital market sheds the early “metaverse” concept, the XR industry is transitioning into a deep-water zone centered on spatial computing and mixed reality. The next stage of competition has moved from simple marketing and volume expansion to hardcore technology battles involving optical display, chip performance optimization, and underlying system advancements.

Behind this management switch, to some extent, is the strategic restructuring experienced by PICO and the entire XR division of ByteDance over the past two years.

After the acquisition in 2021, PICO underwent a period of rapid scale expansion, trying to boost hardware sales through extensive subsidies and marketing. However, limited by bottlenecks in consumer VR hardware penetration and content ecosystem retention, the market did not explode as expected.

In 2023, PICO tightened its strategy and adjusted its organizational structure, shedding some non-core businesses and significantly optimizing personnel. At the time, ByteDance officially refuted rumors about “gradually shutting down PICO,” emphasizing that the company’s long-term commitment to the value of XR remained unchanged and that long-term investment would continue.

After contraction, PICO refocused from blind expansion to core hardware technology and key application scenarios, gradually stabilizing its fundamentals.

At present, the global XR industry is undergoing a long period of adjustment. The launch of Apple Vision Pro set a new technical benchmark for the industry but also confirmed that high hardware costs and ecosystem shortcomings remain real obstacles that cannot be overcome in the short term.

For ByteDance, Zhou Hongwei handing over to Li Xiaokai is not only a routine personnel change but also reflects a substantive internal repositioning for PICO—moving from an aggressive market share expansion phase to a stage of technology accumulation focused on fundamental hardware R&D.

However, the XR industry still faces common issues such as lengthy content ecosystem incubation cycles and persistently high hardware costs. How Li Xiaokai balances resource investment and business efficiency will be his core challenge.

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