Kuaishou Technology, TikTok-owner ByteDance’s biggest rival in China, has asked all employees to work an extra day every two weeks ahead of its initial public offering (IPO) in Hong Kong, following a practice common in China’s tech industry of having staff work more than five days a week.
The company told employees on Tuesday to adopt the new shift starting January 10 and said they will get double pay for working an extra day on the weekend, according to two people familiar with the matter.
More than half of the staff are already working overtime during the weekend, but now the policy has extended to the entire company, the people said. But some staff members have welcomed the change “because it means higher income”, one of them added.
Kuaishou did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.
The company is running at full steam in the run-up to its planned listing in Hong Kong. It filed for the IPO in November and the Post hasreported that a listing could happen as early as January 2021.
Kuaishou had 302 million average daily active users (DAUs) in the first half of the year but has struggled to convert this traffic into profit. In the first half of 2020, it made an operating loss of 7.6 billion yuan (US$1.2 billion), compared with a profit of 1.1 billion yuan in the same period in 2019, according to its prospectus.
It has engaged in cash-burning marketing campaigns, such as becoming the exclusive “red packet” partner of the 2020 Spring Festival Gala in January, where it gave out 1 billion yuan in digital red packets.
The platform also received some negative press recently when live-streamer Xinba, known as Kuaishou’s “sales king”, was fined 900,000 yuan last week for endorsing fake edible birds’ nests.
Founded in 2012, Kuaishou was one of the earliest companies to explore short video but lags behind ByteDance, which launched Douyin in 2016 and international version TikTok one year later. ByteDance generated more than US$3 billion of net profit last year, according to a Bloomberg report, and Douyin’s DAUs surpassed 600 million in August, a 50 per cent increase from 400 million DAUs in January.
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Kuaishou’s move to make staff work extra days is in line with widespread practice in China’s explosive internet industry, which is notorious for working staff overtime. The term 996 – referring to a work schedule from 9am to 9pm, six days a week – became popular last year after a group of programmers launched a movement called 996. ICU on Microsoft’s Github, a global code-sharing and collaboration platform, protesting the lack of work-life balance.
The anti-996 movement included a blacklist of 104 tech companies said to be asking employees to work unpaid overtime, including Huawei Technologies Co., Tencent Holdings, Baidu, Xiaomi, JD.com, ByteDance and Alibaba Group Holding, the owner of the South China Morning Post.
ByteDance is known for its so-called big week/small week model, where employees have to work a six-day week every fortnight. Former and current employees at Chinese telecoms equipment champion, Huawei, have also told the Post that employees routinely work a six-day week every month in return for extra pay or compensation leave, although Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei said in an interview with the Post in March that reports about long working hours at Huawei were misleading.
Huawei declined to comment. ByteDance did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Kuaishou asks employees to do extra shifts
