Xu Yang’s departure follows a 3.7% revenue rise, far short of the 10-15% growth he targeted, as Anta pares back the SV and Super Anta store formats he introduced.
Anta Sports brand has lost the executive who spent two and a half years trying to remake how it sells sneakers. Xu Yang resigned as chief executive of the Anta brand for family reasons, the group confirmed on July 15, with co CEO Lai Shixian stepping in as interim head. The timing coincides with slowing brand growth and a reassessment of the retail formats Xu built their tenure around.
Xu joined Anta in 2006 and cut their teeth running the basketball division before taking over Arc’teryx’s Greater China business around 2019, where they sharply improved store productivity and turned the brand into one of the strongest growth engines inside Amer Sports’ China operations. When they returned to lead the core Anta brand in January 2023, one of the few Anta brand CEOs with a background outside the traditional sales organization, they brought that playbook with them: segment stores by shopping district, consumption occasion and sport category rather than running one format everywhere.
That produced SV stores aimed at premium malls and sneaker collectors, Super Anta outlets for mainstream family shoppers, and flagship concepts like the ANTAZERO zero carbon store and ANTA ARENA, retail treated as brand building and experience space. It also produced Anta’s first US flagship, in Beverly Hills, in February.
The approach worked at Arc’teryx, a narrower, higher price brand. Anta is a different animal: broader consumer base, wider price range, and a large distributor network that makes granular store segmentation far harder to execute at scale. Every new format demands its own exclusive product, inventory allocation and operating model.
That tension is now showing up in the numbers. Anta had planned 160 Super Anta stores for 2025; by June 2026 it had reached only around 120. SV stores, which numbered 62 at the 2025 interim mark, had fallen to roughly 41 by June. Both updated figures are sourced from interviews conducted by Jiemian News and statistics from Anta’s mini program.
The growth gap behind the leadership change
Anta’s official line is that Xu left for family reasons and will be reassigned within the group; a spokesperson told Caixin the brand’s long term strategy is unchanged. That’s the confirmed company position.
Alongside it sits a specific number Xu set for themself: on taking the CEO role, they told the organization they were targeting 10 to 15 percent compound annual revenue growth for the Anta brand between 2023 and 2026. The brand instead posted 3.7 percent revenue growth in 2025, down from 10.6 percent in 2024.
The gap is sharper set against the wider group, whose overall revenue rose 13 percent and net profit 15 percent over the same period, meaning the flagship brand materially lagged the businesses around it.
Part of a wider reshuffle in Chinese sportswear
As earnings growth cools across Chinese sports enterprises, personnel change has become a common lever: 361 Degrees International appointed Men Lijun, a former Nike China vice president for sales, as executive president in June, and Amer Sports named Du Wenjun, formerly Nike China’s product VP, as general manager of Salomon China. The pattern favors executives with Nike China pedigree moving into senior roles at domestic and Amer Sports network brands. Nike’s China bench has become a recruiting ground for competitors navigating their own slowdowns.
