Founder Zhang Yong resumes role as CEO; Haidilao’s top-down reforms slow down.

After a four-year absence from the CEO position, Haidilao founder Zhang Yong has returned to the front lines, once again taking charge of the company’s daily operations. On January 13, Haidilao announced adjustments to its Board of Directors and CEO: Gou Yiqun resigned as executive director and CEO; Chairman Zhang Yong took over as CEO. Hereafter, Gou Yiqun will be responsible for the group’s management process intelligence and automation planning, promoting upgraded operating models and smart middle platform construction to enhance organizational efficiency and decision-making capabilities. At the same time, the Haidilao Board of Directors also completed a new round of reorganization. Executive Vice President Song Qing and Director of Digital Operations Center Gao Jie resigned as executive directors but continue to hold important management roles; Li Nana, Zhu Yinhua, Jiao Defeng, and Zhu Xuanyi have been appointed as executive directors. All four newly appointed directors have grown within Haidilao, coming respectively from regional operations, product and supply chain management, and group strategic support, representing a new generation management team coming to the fore. The founder’s return is often interpreted as a sign that a company is responding to growth pressure, boosting confidence, and driving transformation. In Haidilao’s case, Zhang Yong, as Chairman of the Board, has always been deeply involved in the group’s strategic coordination and has never left the core decision-making circle. With this adjustment, he is now both Chairman of the Board and CEO, forming a highly centralized governance structure. Haidilao may be entering a new phase of “top-down” reform. ## Reasons for Leadership Change Since its 2018 IPO, Haidilao has experienced leadership under three generations. Founder Zhang Yong served as CEO initially, driving rapid store expansion with both revenue and profit climbing sharply. However, during the pandemic, the expansion strategy proved to be a miscalculation, resulting in large-scale store closures and related asset write-downs. In March 2022, Yang Lijuan took over as CEO in a crisis, implementing the “Woodpecker Plan” and “Hard Bone Plan” to shrink inefficient stores and optimize operations. With the recovery of offline consumption the next year, Haidilao’s revenue increased by more than 30% year-on-year. In the first half of 2024, Haidilao’s table turnover rate rebounded to 4.2 times/day, with both revenue and core operating profit hitting historical highs, regaining pre-pandemic momentum. In June of the same year, Yang Lijuan stepped down after achieving her goals and became CEO of Tehai International, Haidilao’s overseas market operator. Gou Yiqun, then Haidilao Vice President in charge of investments, was promoted to the forefront. By this adjustment, Gou Yiqun had served for about a year and a half. His most representative initiative was the formation and development of the “Pomegranate Plan,” marking Haidilao’s high-profile exploration of diversified business models. The “Pomegranate Plan” is designed as Haidilao’s entrepreneurial incubation project for internal and external parties. By building various restaurant operation models, leveraging Haidilao’s mature store manager mechanism, rapid store openings are achieved, with the group offering support in supply chain, membership marketing, and more. By June 30, 2025, excluding its main brand Haidilao Hot Pot, the company was operating 14 restaurant brands—including “Yanqing BBQ Shop,” “Former Impression Lane,” “Little Hai Loves Fried”—for a total of 126 outlets. In the first half of 2025, revenue from Haidilao’s “other restaurants” reached 597 million yuan, up 227% year-on-year, a significant growth rate, though still accounting for less than 3% of the company’s total revenue. While the “Pomegranate Plan” advances steadily, this management reshuffle may be driven by ongoing operating pressure on the main brand. According to Zhaimen CanYan data, with weakening consumer power, the total number of hot pot outlets has been marginally declining, dropping from 569,700 in January 2025 to 491,300 in January 2026—a year-on-year decrease of about 13.7%. Against this backdrop, Haidilao has not been immune. In the first half of 2025, company revenue fell 3.7% year-on-year, core operating profit declined 14%. At a performance briefing, Gou Yiqun admitted: “Consumers increasingly pursue extreme cost-performance, differentiation, personalization, and emotional value. Competitors’ higher value new products have attracted some customers, impacting Haidilao’s dine-in business.” In the first half, Haidilao’s same-store sales dropped 10% year-on-year. The average table turnover decreased from 4.2 to 3.8 times/day, below the internal operational benchmark. To improve store performance, Haidilao is innovating on both product and scenario. For products, they have introduced the Fresh Cut and Seasonal series, and encouraged the development of locally distinctive dishes. As for store ambiance, by the end of June 2025, nearly 30 night-time themed stores had been renovated nationwide; more than 50 themed stores focusing on fresh cut and live products had started operation, with ongoing plans to expand. Store upgrades and menu improvements have also caused cost pressures. Due to increased portion sizes and ingredient input, the proportion of raw material and consumable costs rose 0.8 percentage points to 39.8%. In its semi-annual report, Haidilao’s management reflected, admitting that the performance decline exposed shortcomings in management capability, and committed to further improvement. Currently, Haidilao must tackle both stabilizing table turnover and optimizing costs. ## Diversification Variations Store expansion over the past years has largely delivered Haidilao’s brand value. With over a thousand stores, it’s now difficult for table turnover rates to return to their historic high of 5 times/day. Clearly, store expansion alone can no longer support future growth expectations. Another key goal of Zhang Yong’s return is inevitably focused on diversified growth centered on the “Pomegranate Plan.” Diversification is not new to Haidilao. As early as 2019, Haidilao acquired mid-to-high-end restaurant brand “HanShe” and overseas noodle shop “Hao Noodle.” Around 2020, there was also a wave of internal entrepreneurship among executives, spawning brands like Qin Xiaoxian, Laopai Youmian, Shibashu, and Baifu Private Noodles—more than a dozen in total. Haidilao has not revealed specifics about the performance or development plans for these attempts, nor can their contribution to the group’s overall results be assessed. The “Pomegranate Plan” is different in that Haidilao has brought internal entrepreneurship to the fore with systematic operations: providing entrepreneurial coaching, seed funding, supply chain support, and combining bottom-up entrepreneurship to consciously encourage employees to start new ventures. Haidilao has also set a benchmark brand for this plan—“Yanqing BBQ Shop.” Its first store opened in Xi’an in 2023, and as of June 2025 the number of stores had reached 70, accounting for 56% of Haidilao’s “other restaurants.” Its CEO, Yang Hua, also serves as lead coach for Haidilao’s Entrepreneurship Committee, with the group hoping to leverage his experience to empower more early-stage projects. However, self-incubated brands commonly face uncertainty in timing and success rates. Currently, aside from “Yanqing” which has completed model validation and entered rapid expansion, the market remains unclear about the growth prospects of other brands. Haidilao is quickly shifting resources to rapidly scale proven models from “1” to “100.” In the first half of 2025, the “Pomegranate Plan” added mechanisms for introducing outstanding external brands, resulting in parallel models of internal entrepreneurship, external co-branding, and urban partnerships. A typical example is the externally acquired self-service mini hot pot brand “Juigao.” Priced at 59.9 yuan per person, with six soup bases and hundreds of products, it precisely fills the cost-performance gap Haidilao hadn’t captured. Juigao has expanded rapidly, with ten stores in ten cities nationwide by September 2025 and a concentrated opening of 30 new stores in October. On this basis, Zhang Yong’s return may bring further changes to the “Pomegranate Plan.” Industry insiders familiar with Haidilao told Xinfeng that Haidilao has entered a stage of multi-business, multi-brand parallel development, where coordination between business units, resource sharing, and strategic consistency are now management priorities. “Having Zhang Yong also serve as CEO helps improve the execution efficiency of board decisions.” Changes are expected to quickly reach the sub-brand operations level. Goldman Sachs noted in a January report that Haidilao’s multi-brand strategy under the “Pomegranate Plan” has shifted from a bottom-up to a top-down approach, increasing founder team stakes to reinforce accountability. Goldman Sachs believes Haidilao’s existing sub-brands focused on tier 3/4 cities like hot pot brand “Miao Shixiong” and mini hot pot “Juigao” are performing steadily. In 2026, Haidilao will prioritize promoting “Haidilao Dapaidang Hot Pot,” and plans to incubate 1–3 scale brands with over 500 stores within three years. “Haidilao Dapaidang Hot Pot,” as the latest “Pomegranate Plan” initiative, opened its first store in Shanghai in December 2025, followed by launches in Guangzhou, Qingdao, Wuhan, and more. This brand aims to integrate the “free, browseable, participatory” market atmosphere of outdoor food stalls into the hot pot scene, offering over 200 dishes and maintaining per capita spending at around 100 yuan. Haidilao’s strategic direction remains clear: the main brand focuses on store upgrades and experience innovation to consolidate its core customer base, while sub-brands explore segmented markets through category innovation to open new growth space. Under Zhang Yong’s renewed leadership, whether this giant ship can continue its steady journey remains to be seen. 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