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Gen Z users help TikTok rival Kuaishou expand live-streaming e-commerce business

  • Daily e-commerce users on Tencent-backed Kuaishou exceeded 100 million in the first six months of this year
  • Gen Z users, those born between 1995 and 2002, made up 70 per cent of published content creators on Kuaishou from July 2019 to June this year

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Tencent Holdings-backed Kuaishou has expanded its e-commerce initiatives, in which its video-sharing content creators help drive online retail campaigns. Photo: Reuters
Yujie Xue
Daily live-streaming users on short video-sharing app Kuaishou surged to 170 million during the first half of this year, boosted by increased e-commerce activity and the vast number of original content published by its army of Gen Z creators.
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“We see a high conversion rate of Kuaishou users who turn to live-streaming e-commerce on our platform,” said Yu Shuang, vice-president of e-commerce business at Beijing-based app operator Kuaishou Technology, in an email interview on Thursday. “Data shows that 32 per cent of Kuaishou users buy products because they trust the live streamers’ recommendations.”

The growth in daily live-streaming users, up from about 100 million at the end of December last year, has been helped by Kuaishou’s large base of Gen Z users, those born between 1995 and 2002, according to the app’s first-half content ecosystem report released on Wednesday.

Seventy per cent of users who published content on Kuaishou from July 2019 to June this year were under the age of 30, the report said. There were about 300 million content creators globally who have published on the platform, known as Kwai overseas, during the same period.

Daily e-commerce users on Kuaishou exceeded 100 million in the first six months of this year, according to the report. It said 15 per cent of those users come from China’s first-tier cities; 30 per cent, second-tier cities; 24 per cent, third-tier cities; and 31 per cent, fourth-tier cities.

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Those numbers reflect the broader popularity of live-streaming e-commerce in China, as a growing number of traditional merchants move their retail operations online amid the countrywide lockdowns and social distancing measures imposed during the Covid-19 pandemic.

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