The management philosophy of ANTA SPORTS (ASX: 02020) Chairman Ding Shizhong largely revolves around a single, powerful concept: winning. Growth is the fruit of victory, while talent is its root cause. The power to sow these seeds of cause and effect has always remained firmly in the hands of this pragmatic and formidable entrepreneur.
Ding Shizhong has laid out a twelve-character principle for internal talent selection: understand the business, lead the team, win battles, and withstand high pressure. He has repeatedly emphasized: "ANTA is a results-oriented company that speaks with data. There is no culture of loss at ANTA, only a culture of an iron army that understands the business and a culture of winning!"
Ding Shizhong grants his subordinates considerable autonomy, yet the premise for experimentation is always closely tied to profitability and growth. Between victory and defeat, there is no ambiguous middle ground. This principle underpinned Xu Yang's celebrated appointment to lead the ANTA main brand in 2023, and it ultimately dictated his quiet departure recently.
On July 15th, Xu Yang, CEO of the ANTA Group's main brand, stepped down citing family reasons. He was succeeded by Lai Shixian, an Executive Director and Co-CEO of the ANTA Group.
Three years ago, Xu Yang joined ANTA as brand CEO, parachuting in with a major victory: tripling Arc'teryx's revenue over four years, a success that paved the way for his promotion. Three years later, his exit is directly linked to the mediocre performance of the ANTA main brand, which grew by only 3.7%.
Once highly regarded by Ding Shizhong and dubbed the "bad boy within the system" at ANTA, Xu Yang has now formally concluded his tumultuous tenure of transformation at the company.
From Star Performer to Stumbling Block
Before ANTA Group initiated a series of intensive personnel changes in 2023, Xu Yang had already emerged as a shining star within the company. His tenure at Arc'teryx saw revenue nearly triple in four years, with single-store annual efficiency even reaching 100 million yuan. This major victory served as his letter of introduction to lead the ANTA main brand. However, his inability to replicate this success ultimately led to his downfall in that role.
After becoming CEO of the ANTA main brand, Xu Yang was prolific in his initiatives. He focused on elevating the brand's image and tonality, implementing refined operations and numerous innovative attempts. Concurrently, he actively responded to Ding Shizhong's globalization strategy, concentrating on the main brand's overseas expansion to seek a second growth curve.
Xu Yang, known for his unconventional and unconstrained approach, boldly set a "military order" for himself. He stated plans for the ANTA brand to achieve a 10% to 15% compound annual growth in turnover from 2023 to 2026, targeting 60 billion yuan in revenue by 2026.
To transform the ANTA main brand's mainstream image, Xu Yang spearheaded a revolution in refined operations. He launched targeted products for different consumer segments and created five new store formats and business models, including ANTA SNEAKER VERSE, Super ANTA, and ANTA Champion.
His arrival ended the uniform look of ANTA's regular stores, with vividly colored new outlets spreading across the country. However, brand refinement is not achieved overnight. In the short term, this internal store overhaul made the ANTA main brand's channel structure more complex, and consumers gradually lost their sense of the brand's differentiation.
In less than three years at the helm, Xu Yang found himself mired in a kind of brand infighting where everything was desired but nothing was clearly defined. Aligning different stores and narratives under one unified brand identity proved difficult. An even harder question was: after the brand's rapid transformation, how could ANTA explain to consumers who it truly was?
Xu Yang also dedicated significant effort to the main brand's overseas expansion. In 2021, for ANTA's 30th anniversary, the group shifted its decade-long strategy from "Single Focus, Multi-Brand, Omni-Channel" to "Single Focus, Multi-Brand, Globalization."
Xu Yang once stated that Chinese sports brands going global must forget their domestic glory and redefine themselves for overseas markets, catering to global consumers. He expressed a desire for ANTA to become "the world's ANTA," viewing globalization as a long-term legacy for the brand.
Under his leadership, the ANTA main brand signed NBA stars like Kyrie Irving and Klay Thompson, gaining significant attention. The brand accelerated overseas store expansion, attempting to use global influence to drive brand elevation—a strategy aiming to kill two birds with one stone.
However, by 2025, overseas revenue accounted for only 2.4% of the ANTA main brand's total, a significant gap compared to competitors. This gap is a result. Comprehensive reforms in store segmentation, business model innovation, and brand elevation require time. The failure to translate all these efforts into expected performance ultimately precipitated Xu Yang's departure.
No Room for Mediocrity in Ding's Playbook
Xu Yang's successor as CEO of the ANTA main brand is Lai Shixian, the Group's Co-CEO, known for his solid financial acumen, extensive experience in multi-brand mergers and acquisitions, and a distinguished track record.
Lai Shixian, with a background in finance and as Ding Shizhong's brother-in-law, has witnessed ANTA's growth from small to large, from large to strong. He has been deeply involved in major strategic decisions and assisted Ding in critical risk control. Besides the ANTA main brand, Lai currently oversees other brands except FILA.
Internal assessments of Lai Shixian invariably include the word "steady." He is a typical risk-control manager. Earlier, he led the FILA acquisition, achieving great success for the group, and has consistently played the role of a "ballast stone" within the company.
Following a period of radical advancement, a hard brake is often necessary. Compared to Xu Yang's sweeping and forceful reforms, Lai Shixian resembles more of a controller who can safeguard financial baselines. With Xu Yang's reforms now in the past, leaving many unresolved challenges, Lai's timely arrival may serve to correct the course of this aggressive transformation.
In 2024, the ANTA main brand's revenue was 33.52 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 10.6%. By 2025, brand revenue reached 34.75 billion yuan, but the growth rate rapidly declined to 3.7%, with other profitability metrics also showing varying degrees of decline. The report card Xu Yang delivered was difficult for Ding Shizhong to accept.
The three pillars of ANTA Group's revenue have always been the ANTA main brand, FILA, and other brands led by DESCENTE and KOLON SPORT. The main brand, which consistently contributes the largest share of revenue, has seen sluggish performance in recent years, even facing the risk of negative growth. A personnel change concerning the core was imminent.
At ANTA's 2023 Global Investor Conference, growth targets for the next three years (2024-2026) were set for its brands. Among them, the ANTA brand needed to maintain double-digit growth, and FILA's revenue was targeted to reach 40-50 billion yuan. A subsequent earnings briefing reiterated that "ANTA and FILA revenue growth should reach 10-15% in 2024."
However, since these three-year goals were set, the problem of insufficient momentum in ANTA Group's "dual-engine drive" persists. Affected by factors like increased scale and changing consumer demographics, the growth and profitability of the group's two major brands are under significant pressure in a saturated market.
At this juncture, perhaps more urgent than applying the brakes to radical transformation is finding a captain who can deliver genuine growth for the group.
Sharing similar pressure with Xu Yang is Jiang Yan, the new captain of FILA, one of the dual engines. Having returned to the ANTA system for a second stint, she launched the "ONE FILA" strategy in her first year, 2025, consolidating previously dispersed business lines to focus on the "high-end sports fashion" positioning. She gradually achieved resource synergy and organizational restructuring across brand, product, and retail, ending the infighting state of independent marketing and channels for each line.
In 2025, FILA's revenue was 28.469 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 6.9%, with operating profit at 7.418 billion yuan, up 10.1%. The profit growth rate significantly outpaced revenue growth, essentially holding the group's baseline and largely completing the task of maintaining the lower limit and stabilizing growth assigned by ANTA Group.
However, similar to Xu Yang's situation, the performance under Jiang Yan's leadership at FILA has not achieved breakthrough beyond expectations. Her defensive-oriented approach has not actually broken through FILA's growth ceiling, with the 2025 growth rate of 6.9% representing only a slight improvement over the 5.7% at the end of Yao Weixiong's tenure in 2024.
Whether Xu Yang was a radical reformer or Jiang Yan is a consolidating integrator may ultimately be unimportant. All questions of staying or leaving, to some extent, eventually return to Ding Shizhong's system. In the face of performance, there is only victory or defeat, with no middle ground.
Is This the End of the Story for Xu Yang?
The timing of Xu Yang's departure as CEO of the ANTA main brand is微妙, not far from the release of ANTA Group's half-year report. If the problems currently plaguing ANTA converge at one point, it might be whether the intensive personnel adjustments can find more certainty for the group's growth.
In recent years, ANTA's personnel changes and organizational adjustments have been intense and prolonged. Since 2023, the heads of ANTA Group's core brands have almost all undergone a round of high-density, wide-ranging replacements. Xu Yang was a prominent figure in this dramatic period.
Behind this lies the continuous rotation and adjustment of top leaders across almost all core business segments—from the mass-market base to high-end outdoor lines, from the ANTA main brand to FILA, Arc'teryx, Salomon, etc.—marking a period of relatively intense personnel fluctuation since ANTA's listing.
With ANTA now involved in a wide range of businesses, stabilizing performance has made both business challenges and corresponding personnel adjustments a necessity for the group.
Looking through the lens of ANTA's ongoing密集换帅, the essence is the inevitable growing pains of transitioning from the粗放扩张of brand acquisitions to精细化运营in a存量market. This is not just about the main brand's受阻in高端化or FILA touching its规模天花板. It is also about the命题of ANTA's multi-brand matrix expanding越来越大, demanding increasingly diverse capabilities from its operators.
The seemingly internal issue of the talent pool failing to keep pace with expansion speed can actually be归结为the惯性命题of ANTA Group's experience-driven approach.
"Why does the world need ANTA? How can multi-brands deepen their differentiation strategy? How to create value for shareholders and achieve optimal capital allocation?" Ding Shizhong posed these "Three Questions" in ANTA's 2025 half-year report. To these three questions, Ding Shizhong provided the same answer: mergers and acquisitions.
In his view, building a multi-brand portfolio with distinct differentiation and complementarity is the core engine for持续推动增长. In recent years, Ding Shizhong has remained激进in capital operations. In 2025, ANTA successively acquired Jack Wolfskin and took a stake in Puma, with market rumors occasionally suggesting interest in brands like Reebok and Canada Goose.
Building a vast商业版图through M&A is a perfect match for Ding Shizhong's proven path to success and his expansion ambitions. However, when M&A remains the primary驱动力for this hundred-billion商业帝国, the衍生物of path dependency随之滋生.
During his tenure, the main brand led by Xu Yang was长期定位as the大众市场基本盘,始终承担着the role of continuously "输血" for the group. In this context, how could its brand upgrade reforms align with the group's short-term profit goals? The difficulty of this task is perhaps no less than changing a tire on a car moving at high speed.
Jim Collins noted in "Built to Last" that one trait of great companies is a "purpose beyond profit." Yet, when a company that is already优秀wants to go further and truly迈向卓越, the无形压力of profit and scale often依旧占据第一优先级.
The黯然落幕of figures like Xu Yang may not be over.
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