Four years after stepping down as CEO, Haidilao founder Daniel Zhang returns to the front line, 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; board chairman Daniel Zhang took over as CEO.
Gou Yiqun will thereafter be responsible for the intelligent and automated planning of the group's management processes, promoting the upgrade of operational models and the construction of an intelligent middle platform to enhance organizational efficiency and decision-making capabilities.
At the same time, Haidilao's board of directors has also completed a new round of restructuring.
Executive Vice President Song Qing and Director of Digital Operations Center Gao Jie resigned as executive directors but will continue to hold important management functions; Li Nana, Zhu Yinhua, Jiao Defeng, and Zhu Xuanyi have been appointed as executive directors.
The four newly appointed directors have all grown from within Haidilao, coming from key positions in regional operations, product and supply chain management, and group strategic support, representing a new generation of management taking the stage.
The return of the founder is often interpreted as a sign for the company to respond to growth pressures, boost confidence, and drive transformation. In the case of Haidilao, Daniel Zhang, as chairman of the board, has always been deeply involved in the group's strategic planning and has never been detached from the core decision-making level.
After this adjustment, he will serve as both chairman of the board and CEO, forming a highly centralized governance structure.
Haidilao may be entering a new phase of &#34;top-down&#34; driven transformation.
<h2>Reasons for Leadership Change</h2>
Since its IPO in 2018, Haidilao has gone through three generations of leadership.
Founder Daniel Zhang served as CEO in the early days of the IPO, driving rapid growth in store openings, with both revenue and profit climbing. However, the expansion strategy during the pandemic was misjudged, leading to large-scale store closures and related asset write-downs.
In March 2022, Yang Lijuan was appointed CEO in a time of crisis, using the &#34;Woodpecker Plan&#34; and &#34;Hard Bone Plan&#34; to shrink inefficient stores and optimize operations.
With offline consumption rebounding the following year, Haidilao's revenue achieved over 30% year-on-year growth.
In the first half of 2024, Haidilao's table turnover rate returned to 4.2 times per day, with revenue and core operating profit reaching historical highs, regaining the rhythm before the pandemic.
In June of the same year, Yang Lijuan &#34;retired after success&#34; and took on the role of CEO of Haidilao's overseas market operation entity, Tehai International. At that time, Gou Yiqun, who served as Haidilao's vice president and was responsible for investment business, was promoted to the forefront.
As of this position adjustment, Gou Yiqun had been in office for about a year and a half. The most representative initiative during this period was the formation and development of the &#34;Pomegranate Plan,&#34; marking Haidilao's high-profile exploration of diversified business formats.
The &#34;Pomegranate Plan&#34; was designed as an entrepreneurial incubation project for Haidilao aimed at both internal and external markets, quickly establishing stores by creating different restaurant format models, relying on Haidilao's mature store manager mechanism, and sharing the group's support systems in supply chain and membership marketing.
By June 30, 2025, in addition to the main brand Haidilao Hot Pot, the company had operated 14 restaurant brands, including &#34;Yanqing Barbecue,&#34; &#34;Once Upon a Time in the Alley,&#34; and &#34;Xiao Hai Ai Zha,&#34; with a total of 126 stores.
In the first half of 2025, Haidilao's &#34;other restaurant revenue&#34; reached 597 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 227%, showing significant growth, but still accounting for less than 3% of the company's total revenue
As the &#34;Pomegranate Plan&#34; steadily advances, the variables in this management adjustment may stem from the operational pressures currently faced by the main brand.
According to Narrow Door Restaurant Eye data, due to the downward disturbance in consumer spending power, the overall number of hot pot stores has continued to decline marginally, decreasing from 569,700 in January 2025 to 491,300 in January 2026, a year-on-year decline of approximately 13.7%.
Against this backdrop, HAIDILAO has also been unable to remain unaffected. In the first half of 2025, the company's revenue fell by 3.7% year-on-year, and core operating profit decreased by 14% year-on-year.
Gou Yiqun candidly stated at the earnings conference: &#34;Consumers are increasingly pursuing extreme cost-effectiveness, differentiation, personalization, and emotional value. Competitors have launched new products with better cost-effectiveness, attracting some consumers and having a certain impact on HAIDILAO's dine-in business.&#34;
In the first half of the year, HAIDILAO's same-store sales decreased by 10% year-on-year, and the average table turnover rate dropped from 4.2 times/day in the same period last year to 3.8 times/day, below the company's internally set operational baseline.
To boost store performance, HAIDILAO is promoting innovation from both product and scenario aspects: in terms of products, it has successively launched fresh-cut series and seasonal series, and encouraged the development of dishes with local characteristics.
In terms of scenarios, as of the end of June 2025, nearly 30 late-night theme store renovations have been completed nationwide, and over 50 theme stores focusing on fresh-cut and live products have been put into operation, with plans to continue expanding the scale of such stores in the future.
The update of store types and the upgrade of dishes have also brought cost pressures. Due to increased portion sizes and material inputs, the proportion of raw material and consumable costs has risen by 0.8 percentage points, reaching 39.8%.
In the semi-annual report, HAIDILAO's management reflected on the situation, pointing out that the decline in performance reflects insufficient management capabilities, and committed to continue efforts and improvements.
Currently, HAIDILAO must simultaneously address the two major challenges of stabilizing the table turnover rate and optimizing costs.
<h2>Diversification Variation</h2>
The store expansion over the past few years has largely realized HAIDILAO's brand value. With over a thousand stores, its table turnover rate has become difficult to return to the historical high of 5 times/day.
Clearly, store expansion alone is no longer sufficient to support future growth expectations. Another key goal of Daniel Zhang's return must point towards a diversified growth path centered on the &#34;Pomegranate Plan.&#34;
Diversification attempts are not new for HAIDILAO.
As early as 2019, HAIDILAO acquired the mid-to-high-end dining brand &#34;Han She&#34; and the overseas noodle restaurant &#34;Hao Noodle.&#34;
Around 2020, there was also a wave of internal entrepreneurship among the executive team. The brands born during that time include Qin Xiaoxian, Lao Pai You Mian, Shiba Cun, and Bai Fu Private Noodles, totaling more than ten.
HAIDILAO has not disclosed the actual operational performance and development plans of these attempts, and the contribution of the aforementioned brands to the group's overall performance cannot be assessed.
The difference with the &#34;Pomegranate Plan&#34; is that HAIDILAO is bringing internal entrepreneurship to the forefront in a systematic operational form: providing entrepreneurial guidance, startup funds, supply chain support, and consciously stimulating employees' entrepreneurial willingness through a bottom-up entrepreneurial mechanism.
HAIDILAO has also set a benchmark for this plan with &#34;Yanqing Barbecue&#34;.
The brand's first store opened in Xi'an in 2023, and by the end of June 2025, the number of stores had reached 70, accounting for 56% of HAIDILAO's total &#34;other restaurants&#34;.
Its CEO Yang Hua also serves as the chief coach of HAIDILAO's entrepreneurship committee, and the group may hope to leverage his experience to empower more early-stage projects.
However, self-owned brand incubation generally faces uncertainties in cycles and success rates. Currently, apart from &#34;Yanqing,&#34; which has completed model validation and entered a rapid expansion phase, the market still lacks clear recognition of the growth potential of other brands.
HAIDILAO will quickly shift resources to rapidly scale the validated model from &#34;1&#34; to &#34;100.&#34;
In the first half of 2025, the &#34;Pomegranate Plan&#34; introduced a mechanism for bringing in outstanding external brands, forming a situation where internal entrepreneurship, external brand co-creation, and city cooperation coexist in various models.
A typical case is the externally acquired single-person self-service hot pot brand &#34;Ju Gao Gao.&#34; With a pricing of 59.9 yuan per person, combined with six types of soup bases and hundreds of products, it precisely fills the cost-performance gap that HAIDILAO has not occupied.
Ju Gao Gao is expanding extremely rapidly. By September 2025, it had opened ten stores in ten cities across the country, and in October, it achieved the concentrated opening of 30 new stores.
On this basis, Daniel Zhang's return may bring a new variation to the &#34;Pomegranate Plan.&#34;
Industry insiders familiar with HAIDILAO pointed out to Xinfeng that HAIDILAO has entered a stage of parallel multi-format and multi-brand operations, where coordination between various business segments, resource sharing, and strategic consistency have become new management priorities. &#34;Having Daniel Zhang concurrently serve as CEO helps improve the efficiency of board decision-making at the execution level.&#34;
Changes are expected to quickly translate to the operational level of sub-brands.
Goldman Sachs noted in its research report this January that HAIDILAO's multi-brand strategy under the &#34;Pomegranate Plan&#34; has shifted from a bottom-up model to a top-down approach, strengthening accountability by increasing the founding team's shareholding ratio.
Goldman Sachs believes that among HAIDILAO's existing sub-brands, the hot pot brand &#34;Miao Shixiong&#34; and the small hot pot &#34;Ju Gao Gao,&#34; which focus on third- and fourth-tier cities, are performing steadily. In 2026, HAIDILAO will focus on promoting &#34;HAIDILAO Dapaidang Hot Pot&#34; and plans to incubate 1-3 scalable brands with over 500 stores in the next three years.
&#34;HAIDILAO Dapaidang Hot Pot,&#34; as the latest attempt of the &#34;Pomegranate Plan,&#34; opened its first store in Shanghai in December 2025, and subsequently landed in Guangzhou, Qingdao, Wuhan, and other cities.
This brand attempts to integrate the &#34;free, strollable, and participatory&#34; atmosphere of street stalls into the hot pot scene, offering over 200 dishes, with per capita consumption maintained 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 niche markets through category innovation to open up growth space.
Against the backdrop of Daniel Zhang's return to the helm, whether this large ship can continue to sail steadily still requires time to provide an answer

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- After a four-year absence, Haidilao founder Zhang Yong has returned as CEO, overseeing daily operations effective January 13.  
- The board reshuffle also saw the appointment of four new executive directors from within the company, indicating a shift towards a new management team.  
- This transition may signify an effort to address growth challenges and enhance organizational efficiency, as Haidilao adapts to changing consumer demands and explores diversification strategies under the "Pomegranate Plan."

Founder Daniel Zhang resumes CEO position, HAIDILAO undergoes top-down reform