Xu Yang, CEO of the Anta brand, is stepping down.
According to Anta Group, Xu resigned from the position for family reasons. The group has approved his resignation and will assign him to another role. Lai Shixian, an executive director and co-CEO of Anta Group, will serve as acting CEO of the Anta brand, effective immediately.
The Anta brand’s long-term development strategy remains unchanged, the group said. It added that Anta Group has comprehensive organizational and business management systems, continues to recruit talent globally, and will support the brand as it deepens its focus on mass-market sportswear.
Before Xu, the Anta brand CEO position was held by Ding Shizhong, Zheng Jie, and Wu Yonghua, all of whom came from sales backgrounds. Xu was the first marketing executive to take the role.
He joined Anta in 2006 after working in the multinational advertising agency sector. He later served as director of the company’s brand management center and general manager of its basketball business unit.
In 2019, Xu became general manager of Arc’teryx in Greater China. Over the next four years, the brand’s China revenue increased from about RMB 800 million (USD 118 million) to nearly RMB 3 billion (USD 442.5 million), while its membership grew from 14,000 to 1.7 million.
In early 2023, Anta carried out its largest organizational restructuring since going public. Xu returned to lead the Anta brand after overseeing Arc’teryx’s expansion in China.
Three years into his tenure, however, the brand has not met the growth targets he set. 36Kr was unable to confirm whether its performance contributed to his departure.
The Anta brand has historically contributed 40–50% of the group’s total revenue, making it Anta Group’s largest revenue source.
At Anta’s investor day in October 2023, Xu set a target for the brand to maintain a compound annual growth rate of 10–15% in retail sales from 2023 to 2026.
In an interview with China Entrepreneur magazine in early 2025, he set a more ambitious goal, saying the Anta brand aimed to overtake Nike in China within three years.
The brand’s subsequent growth has fallen short of that pace.
The Anta brand generated RMB 33.5 billion (USD 4.9 billion) in revenue in 2024, up 10.6% year-on-year and near the lower end of Xu’s target range. Revenue rose to RMB 34.8 billion (USD 5.1 billion) in 2025, but growth slowed to 3.7%. Its gross profit margin and operating profit margin declined by 0.9 and 0.3 percentage points, respectively.
In the first quarter of 2026, the brand recorded high-single-digit growth.
With the three-year period now in its final year, achieving the original compound growth target would require a substantial acceleration.
After taking office, Xu promoted a strategy described internally as “making Anta smaller.” Its central principle was to separate the online and offline businesses. Basic products would be sold mainly online, while physical stores would move away from the standardized format used across thousands of outlets. Category and retail-format innovation would instead be used to reshape the in-store experience.
Xu proposed closing stores with low sales per square meter and increasing the average transaction value to more than RMB 800 (USD 118).
Under his leadership, Anta developed several store formats and sub-brands, including Anta Guanjun, Super Anta, SV, Arena & Palace, and Anta Zero. The goal was to expand beyond Anta’s traditional county-level retail network and enter prime commercial districts and fashion-focused locations.
Xu said publicly at the time that, under his direction, the company would tolerate short-term losses from new businesses.
The retail experiment began to retrench before the new formats had established a repeatable commercial model.
According to an earlier report by Gaze, which Anta later confirmed, the SV business unit has been dismantled and integrated into the Anta brand’s sports lifestyle footwear division.
Super Anta will stop expanding rapidly in 2026 and enter a period of adjustment. It will continue operating at its current scale for at least the remainder of the year.
Anta Guanjun was positioned as a potential growth platform in outdoor sports, but its store openings have proceeded more slowly than expected. Some outlets have already been converted back into general-format stores.
Arena & Palace was positioned as a high-end streetwear concept. It opened experimental stores in a small number of cities, including Chengdu and Shanghai. Sales per square meter are reportedly below expectations, and the concept has yet to produce a model that can be replicated at scale.
Anta Zero’s zero-carbon stores have remained primarily part of the company’s sustainability efforts and have made a limited contribution to revenue.
Most of the new formats remain in an investment phase and have yet to generate sufficient cash flow to support themselves independently.
An Anta employee said the company’s profits still come mainly from full-price stores. The employee said the SV model had performed below expectations, while Super Anta’s stores were too large, resulting in low sales per square meter and drawing business away from full-price stores.
The employee added that the two channels would likely complete their inventory reductions this year.
Anta has long relied on a large distributor network to expand its business. “With any innovation, the distributors are the first hurdle it has to clear,” one source said.
People familiar with the company said Xu’s approach was less suited to the relationship-driven cooperation required to secure distributor support, making some of his reforms harder to implement.
Commenting on Super Anta, an insider said:
“The idea was good, but with the new store format, there was no new team to manage it, and there was no genuinely matching new merchandise.”
The Anta employee said the company needed innovation, but that few executives had previously attempted to change its store formats.
“Before Xu, no one was willing to innovate at the store level,” the employee said.
Basketball, a category that had played an important role earlier in Xu’s career, also failed to become a major new growth driver during his tenure.
After taking office, Xu briefly made basketball a strategic priority. Signing NBA star Kyrie Irving and expanding overseas were two of the most prominent initiatives under his leadership.
Anta often uses an internal competition model in which teams submit rival proposals. For the first Kyrie product, teams in China and the US produced competing designs, with the US team’s proposal ultimately selected.
Coordination with Anta’s domestic supply chain, however, reportedly failed to keep pace. The production cycle was shortened from the usual eight months to four months. The US team held only two production coordination sessions before the product was brought to market, where its performance fell short of expectations.
Since Irving signed with Anta, the line has released two flagship products. Neither has generated significant sales or sustained consumer attention, according to people familiar with the business.
36Kr also learned that Xu led a proposed endorsement deal with Stephen Curry that had reached the product design stage. Anta offered as much as USD 70 million, but Ding Shizhong ultimately halted the deal.
The proposal was abandoned as Anta’s basketball business was weakening.
According to brokerage firms that track e-commerce platform data, sales of Anta basketball shoes totaled about RMB 50 million (USD 7.4 million) in the third quarter of 2025. That was substantially below sales of its running shoes, casual footwear, and skate-style sneakers.
With annual revenue exceeding RMB 80 billion (USD 11.8 billion), Anta Group has built extensive capabilities in operating efficiency, supply chain management, and retail distribution. Its integration of Amer Sports, along with the growth of brands such as Descente and Kolon Sport, has also demonstrated its ability to manage a portfolio of brands across markets.
For the flagship Anta brand, however, the central challenge remains unresolved: how can it balance growth with brand equity, and its distributor network with retail innovation?
Xu’s departure may indicate that the brand is stepping back, at least temporarily, from aggressive retail expansion and refocusing on efficiency. That shift would draw on Anta Group’s established strengths in distribution and supply chain management to support its core namesake brand.
KrASIA features translated and adapted content that was originally published by 36Kr. This article was written by He Zhexin and Ren Cairu for 36Kr.
Note: RMB figures are converted to USD at rates of RMB 6.78 = USD 1 based on estimates as of July 17, 2026, unless otherwise stated. USD conversions are presented for ease of reference and may not fully match prevailing exchange rates.