After two months of stopping updating, “Li Ziqi” has once again become the focus of public opinion in China.
On September 16, a microblog topic “Li Yapeng denied poaching Li Ziqi’s team” hit the Weibo hot search and quickly caused a heated debate.
As Li Yapeng transformed into a web star, and his videos began to appear like Li Ziqi’s “idyllic style”, there was speculation that Li Yapeng had poached Li Ziqi’s team, but both Li Yapeng and Li Ziqi debunked this rumor.
Behind the rumors of the team being dug, it is not unrelated to Li Ziqi’s recent “abnormal” state. The company has been in a long period of “no update” since July 2021 when it updated the video content of the concluding chapter of “The Salt of the Well”. “The actual “capital good means” reply was once deleted in a second.
Stopping updates, calling the police, refuting rumors… all kinds of strange information have made “what happened to Li Ziqi” become a common question in the mind of netizens.
What happened to Li Ziqi?
The sensitive Chinese internet users sniffed out a hint of a different flavor.
As the “top stream” of the short videos, Li Ziqi first fell into the “interruption update period”, and then in August, some netizens met Li Ziqi at the police station, many people initially thought she was harassed by the traffic anchor. But Li Ziqi replied to the fan and then deleted the sentence “I’ve let the lawyer do the saving, it’s terrible! Capital is really good”, let netizens put the direction of speculation on the possible conflict between Li Ziqi and her contracted MCN agency Weinian.
On September 16, a blogger posted on Weibo, “Li Ziqi’s current situation is far worse than everyone imagined ……”, and pointed out that Li Ziqi had suffered a big loss in the equity structure, and might be reduced to a situation of “no income”.
This wave of remarks quickly caused widespread debate on the Internet.
According to the Tianyancha APP, there are only two companies that have a direct equity relationship with Li Ziqi (Li Jiajia, Li Ziqi’s real name), one is the Shanghai Shenxiangli Creative Planning Studio, which is 100% owned by Li Ziqi, and the other is Sichuan Ziqi Culture Communication Co.
As for the list of executives and shareholders of Weinnian, Li Ziqi’s name does not appear, and the only information that appears in the Weinnian company is a partner position. The trademarks related to Li Ziqi are mostly in Sichuan Ziqi, and another small part is in Weinian. The number of participants is 504 for Weinian, and 0 for both Sichuan Ziqi and Shanghai ShenXiangLi.
For this reason, some microbloggers analyzed that Weinian and Li Ziqi’s joint shareholding company Sichuan Ziqi and Weinian itself actually play different roles, the former undertakes the export of external content, holding 200+ Li Ziqi-related trademarks, while the latter is mainly responsible for the implementation and execution of Li Ziqi’s brand business, which is really earning “a lot of money that “. The number of participants in Sichuan Ziqi is 0, which is also considered to be the proof that “the daily operation of Li Ziqi brand to the commercial realization of the relevant personnel belong to Hangzhou Weinnian”.
“The distribution of equity 51%>49%, Hangzhou Weinnian relatively control Sichuan Ziqi.” The blogger said that if the company’s articles of association are not “set”, Li Ziqi has a veto power over Sichuan Ziqi with 49% of the shares, but if the company’s articles of association are buried, it may “even delegate its voting rights”.
But Li Chengdong, founder of Dolphin Think Tank, believes that Weinnian is completely innocent. As an MCN agency, it is impossible to write thousands of netizens/potentials as shareholders in the company from the beginning, and when the potentials become netizens, for the dual purpose of strengthening the relationship between MCN agencies and netizens and netizens wanting to make more money, they usually only set up a separate brand company together to gain benefits through licensing.
“Li Ziqi allocated 49% of the benefits of the Li Ziqi brand is not a lot, after all, it is incubated by Weinian, and is not involved in the commercialization of the Li Ziqi brand.” Li Chengdong said on Weibo.
However, another MCN agency founder told AI Finance, “Weinian financed N rounds of funding, are taking Li Ziqi endorsement, substantial help is not, Li Ziqi is done up before being signed, not they are incubated from the vegetarian, they do not have the ability to incubate, will only cut off”. He does not recognize the ability of Weinnian.
The company behind Li Ziqi
What kind of company is Weinian, which is involved in this story of suspected “dark rivalry” with Li Ziqi?
According to the Tianyancha App, Weinnian was founded on February 28, 2013 with a registered capital of about 7.761 million yuan, and its legal representative and beneficial owner is Liu Tongming, who holds 20.44% of Weinnian’s shares. In the public information, Weinian is an MCN agency whose main business in the early days was to incubate Chinese web celebrities.
In 2016, Li Ziqi’s Weibo fan base was less than 10,000, but he was already well known. The experienced founder of Weinnian, Liu Tongming, soon smelled Li Ziqi’s business potential and flew to Sichuan to meet with him, and the two had a hot pot date to discuss the cooperation.
In 2017, Weinnian set up a cultural communication company for Li Ziqi in Sichuan, which opened Li Ziqi’s road to rebellion. At that time, under Weinian Technology, in addition to Li Ziqian, there were many other weblebrities who had cooperated with Weinian or were directly incubated by Weinian, such as dozens of Chinese short video weblebrities. But in the end, it was Li Ziqi who carried the flag.
In terms of traffic and influence, by 2018, the number of Li Ziqi’s Weibo fans had quickly exceeded 10 million. At the same time, Li Ziqi’s commercial real estate ability also began to emerge like crazy. In August of that year, Li Ziqi’s eponymous Tmall store was officially opened. With the huge fan traffic, Li Ziqi’s brand quickly became popular in a very short time, and the sales volume of five products in the store exceeded 150,000 in just three days.
But the most money-sucking and hot is also the later launch of Li Ziqi snail noodles. Some data show that the annual sales scale of the Li Ziqi brand in 2020 is about 1.6 billion yuan. Among them, monthly sales of snail noodles alone exceeded 1 million, selling 500 million yuan a year.
Behind this, there is no shortage of Weinian, an MCN company. In July 2020, Weinnian even changed its industry code from the original “other technology promotion services” to “other technology promotion services”. In July 2020, Weinnian changed its industry code from “other technology promotion services” to “Internet retail”.
“This company is particularly good at capital operation and marketing.” The aforementioned MCN agency source told AI Financial News. In addition to the commercial realization of Li Ziqi’s brand value, Weinnian has pulled in more investors by relying on Li Ziqi, and it has started to apply for various use lists of trademarks related to Li Ziqi one after another after signing a contract with Li Ziqi.
According to the Tianyancha APP, after reaching a tie-up with Li Ziqi, Weinian first received tens of millions of Series A financing led by Huaying Capital and followed by Tuo Shi Capital in May 2017, equity financing from Chenhai Capital in November 2017, and Series B financing of 80 million yuan in May 2018 from Mangguo Wenchuang and Sina Weibo War Capital, and in the following two years, we have received a series of financing from In July 2021, Byte Jump also rushed to the battlefield and took a 1.48% stake in Weinian.
However, another fact that cannot be ignored is that in the past few years, “Li Ziqi” is indeed the “best backing” for Weinian. Once the two sides have irreparable conflicts and entanglements, as speculated by netizens, it will definitely cause more trauma to both sides.