ByteDance, a leading Chinese internet company operating several machine learning-enabled content platforms worldwide, now has a mission to become the most successful globalized Chinese company.
ByteDance (字节跳动), a leading Chinese internet company operating several machine learning-enabled content platforms worldwide, now has a mission to become the most successful globalized Chinese company. CAI Qi (蔡奇), the current Communist Party Secretary of Beijing visited the company on November 13 this Tuesday, proposed the expectation.
ByteDance was founded by serial entrepreneur ZHANG Yiming (张一鸣) in 2012. Unlike the traditional way of searching, its core product Jinri Toutiao provides users a new way to receive customized contents, and the more users clicked on content, the more Jinri Toutiao learned their interests, more accurate recommendations will follow, the so-called AI technologies become its magic winning weapons.
Except for Jinri Toutiao, ByteDance also owns Tik Tok, Muscal.ly, BuzzVideo, Vigo Video, News Republic and so on. According to the official data, Daily active users (DAU) of ByteDance reached 300 million this March, even surpassed the long-standing giant Baidu, which made ByteDance the most popular content platform in China.
From September to October 2018, ByteDance finished a USD 4 billion Pre-IPO round investment from Softbank, KKR, General Atlantic, Primavera, H Capital, at the value of more than USD 75 billion, which made the company the most valuable startup in the world. Now ByteDance is the third valuable internet company in China only after Alibaba, Tencent. Baidu, one of “BAT”, a club of three largest internet companies since a decade ago, its market value is USD 64.5 billion on November 15, 2018.
ByteDance has accelerated its global expansion since 2018, now ByteDance operates in Japan, South Korea, ASEAN, North America, Europe, Brazil and India, and has more than 150 million daily active users in overseas markets. Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu, though started their internationalization much earlier, the achievements are less bright compared to ByteDance.
ByteDance has been actively recruiting the international teams to localize its operation, but risks remain huge; the authorities in Indonesia banned Tik Tok this year for hosting “negative” content.
——Author: YuanPu; Write to YuanPu at YuanPu@EqualOcean.com