The company has more than 150,000 employees and operates offices worldwide. In March, its subsidiary Lark Technologies launched a product called Lark, a productivity and workplace collaboration tool. The app’s users spent approximately $5.5 million globally on these coins in February, an increase of about 243% from an estimated $1.6 million worth in February 2018, according to data from app analytics firm Sensor Tower. Bytedance’s rise in China has not been without conflict or controversy, however.
- The incident prompted Zhang to publicly apologize for “publishing a product that collided with core socialist values,” and it highlights the potential pitfalls of operating online platforms in China.
- The spokesperson declined to comment on the music streaming product report when contacted by CNBC.
- The company’s most notable achievement is in gaining its level of success without being propped up by any of the country’s internet mega-giants like Tencent, Alibaba, or Baidu.
It’s the first Chinese company to tap into the lucrative social media appetite of Westerners, and that could prove to be very valuable indeed. TikTok called the Chinese government’s 1% share in Douyin a “common arrangement” under Chinese law. It has no bearing on ByteDance’s global operations, including TikTok, it said. She said ByteDance has provided disclosures to Washington, bitcoin price news by cointelegraph D.C., courts; to funders; and in Chinese government documents. Tibaut said those disclosures show that 60% of TikTok is owned by global investors, as TikTok told PolitiFact and Paul told Kilmeade. The bill would require ByteDance, a China-based company, to sell TikTok, which has 170 million U.S. users, to a non-Chinese owner within six months or face a U.S. ban.
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In 2022 Forbes technology reporter Emily Baker-White claimed that she had been spied on and tracked by ByteDance after writing an article critical of TikTok. Company officials initially rebuffed these claims but later admitted that their employees had obtained data from American TikTok users, including journalists and those connected to them. According to Baker-White, this misuse of data included spying on her and other users’ IP addresses in an attempt to track an internal mole at the company who was thought to be in contact with reporters. Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced that they had begun an investigation in late 2022 into the claim against ByteDance. It also has others like TopBuzz, a platform that recommends trending videos and articles to users, and BaBe, a news aggregation app in Indonesia.
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The company’s most notable achievement is in gaining its level of success without being propped up by any of the country’s internet mega-giants like Tencent, Alibaba, or Baidu. Alibaba was turned down this year after expressing interest in an investment or acquisition, according to Reuters, while Tencent is said to have divested itself of a small stake in Bytedance some time ago. The company’s U.S. data-storing plan is known as Project Texas and began in 2022 as a way to assure U.S. users their data was secure. There have been previous issues, such as when ByteDance employees accessed data of Forbes journalists in 2022 and used it to track their movements. There was no evidence that China’s government compelled ByteDance employees to access the data to discover who was leaking information to the press about ByteDance’s links to China, Forbes reported.
The spokesperson declined to comment on the music streaming product report when contacted by CNBC. In 2018, ByteDance hit the lower end of its revenue target of 50 billion to 55 billion yuan ($7.2 billion to $7.9 billion), according to a Bloomberg report. The company lost $1.2 billion last year, reported digital media firm The Information. ByteDance is part of a growing number of Chinese companies setting its sights on overseas markets including the U.S.
The first product the group produced was the app Neihan Duanzi (“profound gags”), which allowed users to share jokes and memes. This was followed by the news aggregator app Toutiao, which used machine and deep learning algorithms to deliver a personalized news feed to users. Toutiao became an early flagship of ByteDance and continues to have more than 300 million monthly active users. The company also developed the Indian https://www.topforexnews.org/books/what-is-forex-trading-how-to-trade-online/ social media app Hello, as well as the popular Indonesian news aggregator Baca Berita (BaBe). The incident prompted Zhang to publicly apologize for “publishing a product that collided with core socialist values,” and it highlights the potential pitfalls of operating online platforms in China. Tencent has had its clashes with the government, too, most recently being hit by restrictions on video game releases and play time.
President Joe Biden in December 2022 signed a law barring federal employees from using TikTok on government-owned devices, with limited exceptions. States, local governments and universities have instituted similar TikTok bans on devices they own. Thibaut also said that the government-owned China Internet Investment Fund has a 1% share in Douyin, and China’s Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission has a board member on Douyin.
International focus
But the app’s success does follow a familiar pattern for Bytedance, which has demonstrated a startling ability to launch, grow, and sustain services that have users hooked. You could be forgiven for not having heard the name Bytedance before the recent news. The founder, 35-year-old Zhang Yiming, rarely gives interviews, and the company’s Western-facing media presence is close to nonexistent.
Earlier this year, ByteDance acquired some patents and the team behind a Chinese smartphone brand called Smartisan. A spokesperson for ByteDance declined to comment on the financial figures when contacted by CNBC. With funding from the likes of SoftBank and Sequoia Capital driving the valuation so high, Bytedance won’t have many options other than to eventually file an IPO if it ever wants to raise more cash and return money to investors.
Bytedance is the first Chinese internet company with a significant, genuinely engaged following around the world, which means it’s worthy of serious attention. TikTok is inescapable right now, and it’s not just teens paying attention — it’s rocked the business world as well. Bytedance, the owner of the wildly popular short-form video app, is now valued at more than $75 billion following a new round https://www.forex-world.net/stocks/toyota/ of investment. This means Uber has unexpectedly lost its long-held title of the world’s most valuable tech startup to a low-profile challenger from China. The valuation is eye-grabbing, to be sure, and it would be perfectly reasonable to suggest that, say, Uber will ultimately be the bigger deal in the future. At this point, though, it wouldn’t be so reasonable to ignore Bytedance altogether.
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The company launched Toutiao, one of its flagship products, in August 2012. Approximately a year later, ByteDance accelerated globalization with the launch of its global short video product, TikTok. It quickly took off in markets like Southeast Asia, signaling a new opportunity for the company.
ByteDance is reportedly exploring a whole host of new areas that could unlock new monetization potential. It’s looking to expand beyond those services to potentially new areas like smartphones, as it looks for further growth areas — but analysts said that could be a tough task. / Sign up for Verge Deals to get deals on products we’ve tested sent to your inbox daily. A Facebook post included what looked like a screengrab from a widely shared TMZ video, but the image has been altered. Both Gallagher and Krishnamoorthi serve on the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party.
Zhang and Tencent founder Pony Ma have jabbed at each other in public, and the companies have filed multiple lawsuits against one another. In the most recent clash this summer, Bytedance accused Tencent of blocking TikTok videos from its platforms, including dominant messaging app WeChat; Tencent retorted by suing Bytedance for libel and anti-competitive practices. Some legislators and U.S. officials have raised concerns that Chinese national security laws could require ByteDance to turn over TikTok data about American users to the Chinese government.
The Chinese giant is now one of the most valuable private technology firms in the world, reportedly worth $75 billion, and owns a variety of apps from news aggregators to social media services. Information on ByteDance, a privately owned company, comes from TikTok and is difficult to independently verify. TikTok said 60% of ByteDance is owned by global investors, including U.S.-based investors, 20% by its Chinese co-founders and 20% by its employees, including thousands in the U.S. The company’s vice president has attested to that structure in a letter to Congress.
TikTok denies that China could force ByteDance to turn over U.S. user data. Beckerman’s letter addressed some of those concerns, saying that since January 2023, new U.S. TikTok data has been stored in the Oracle Cloud in the U.S. and controlled by TikTok’s U.S. subsidiary, U.S. Only the Data Security team employees can access U.S. user data, it said. There are limited exceptions for legal and compliance reasons, which does not include adhering to China’s national security law, it said. House Committee on Energy and Commerce to address accusations that the app is a threat to American national security.
