In April 2024, a Financial Times article citing current and former Kuaishou employees stated that the company has been running an ageist redundancy programme known internally as "Limestone", culling workers in their mid-30s.[22] In June 2024, Kuaishou and the Sichuan international communication center launched a branch center in São Paulo, Brazil.[23]
In June 2024, Kuaishou released its diffusion transformer text-to-video model, Kling, which they claimed could generate two minutes of video at 30 frames per second and in 1080p resolution. The model has been compared to that of OpenAI's Sora text-to-video model. It is accessible to the public on Kuaishou's video editing app KwaiCut via signing up for a waitlist with a Chinese phone number.[24][25][26]
As of 2019, it has a worldwide user base of over 200 million,[3] leading the "Most Downloaded" lists of the Google Play and Apple App Store in eight countries, such as Brazil. In Pakistan and Indonesia, this app is known as Snack Video.[4] It is often referred to as "Kwai" in overseas markets. Its main competitor is Douyin, which is known as TikTok outside China.[5]
Kuaishou's overseas team is led by the former CEO of the application 99, and staff from Google, Facebook, Netflix, and TikTok were recruited to lead the company's international expansion.[6]
Compared to its main short video platform competitor Douyin, Kuaishou is more popular with older users who live outside China's Tier 1 cities. Its initial popularity came from videos of Chinese rural life.[8][27] Kuaishou also relied more on e-commerce revenue than on advertising revenue compared to its main competitor.[28]
Kuaishou Technology (Chinese: 快手; lit. 'quick hand') is a Chinese publicly traded partly state-owned holding company based in Haidian District, Beijing, that was founded in 2011 by Hua Su (宿华)[1] and Cheng Yixiao (程一笑).[2] The company is known for developing a mobile app for sharing users' short videos, a social network, and video special effects editor