Jean Liu of China’s Didi Exits Kering Board

Denni Hu
·2 min read
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SHANGHAI — Kering revealed changes in the membership of the board of directors during its first-half results report on Wednesday.

Jean Liu, president of the Chinese ride-hailing company Didi Chuxing, resigned from her role as an independent director of the French luxury group.

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In 2020, Liu joined Credit Suisse Group ex-chief executive officer Tidjane Thiam and British actress Emma Watson as members of the board. Liu was the first and only Asian person on Kering’s 12-member board at the time.

“The collective intelligence that comes from diverse points of view and the richness of different experiences are crucial to the future of our organization,” François-Henri Pinault, Kering chairman and CEO, said in a statement.

“I was hit by Kering’s ’emotional marketing’ initiative last December. Successful brands create emotional resonance. Users get more than the product or the service itself,” Liu wrote in a Weibo post at the time of the assignment. “To let our riders and drivers experience more emotional comfort is something I need to learn from our board meetings every year.”

The 43-year-old executive’s expertise in new technologies and the Chinese market helped her become one of the most influential businesswomen in China. Joining Didi from Goldman Sachs in 2014, Liu was also the power broker behind Apple’s $1 billion investment in Didi.

As the only child of Lenovo founder Chuanzhi Liu, Liu continued the family legacy in the tech world to build Didi into a $68 billion company that went public on Wall Street in 2021.

Just days after Didi’s market debut, the Chinese government launched a cybersecurity probe into the tech giant. Didi delisted from the U.S. exchange in June, and the dust settled on the case last week as the company paid the state a $1.2 billion fine. Didi chairman and CEO Wei Cheng and Liu also paid a 1 million renminbi, or $148,000, fine separately.

Caught in a media firestorm, Liu and her father removed all social media content on Weibo.

Liu shut down media speculation last September that she was ready to quit her role as Didi president.

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