Beijing-based unicorn Bytedance has been contacted by authorities for a potential listing on the Technology Innovation Board.
The parent company of TikTok, Beijing-based unicorn Bytedance has been contacted by authorities for a potential listing on the Technology Innovation Board of Shanghai Stock Exchange, according to South China Morning Post, citing people familiar with the matter.
The report says the social media and online content giant has started talks with investment banks about its IPO plans since last summer. The company considered to go public either at the New York Stock Exchange or the HongKong Stock Exchange, but finally attracted by the newly proposed Technology Innovation Board.
The company's latest comment on the report is that the rumor is not the truth, but doesn’t give any further details, according to Sina Tech.
The company’s latest financing round was closed in October 2018, which valued the company at USD 76 billion and made it the most valuable unicorn in the world, according to the report.
ByteDance's core product, Toutiao (今日头条, "Headlines"), is a popular content platform in China. Toutiao started out as a news recommendation engine and gradually evolved into a platform delivering content in a variety of formats, such as texts, images, question-and-answer posts, microblogs, and videos. Toutiao offers its users personalized information feeds that are powered by machine learning algorithms. A content feed is updated based on what the machine learns about a user’s reading preferences.
ByteDance also pioneered the video-sharing mobile app TikTok. After it acquired music start-up musical.ly, the company combined the two platforms into a single application under the Tik Tok name. It also runs BuzzVideo and Vigo Video.
Along with Toutiao, TikTok and other time-killing apps such as Xigua Video and Huashan Video, Bytedance had over 800 million daily active users across all of its content platforms as of November 2018.
The Technology Innovation Board is widely regarded as China’s Nasdaq, was initially announced by President Xi Jinping in his keynote speech at the opening of the first China International Import Expo in Shanghai on November 2018, that the Shanghai Stock Exchange will launch a new board to experiment with a registration-based system for listed companies, reported China Daily.
The new board will make it the first time that a Chinese stock exchange adopts a registration-based initial public offerings (IPO) mechanism to startups fundraising. Under the registration-based IPO system, regulators will review applicants’ earning potential, rather than requiring them to meet the requirements of being consistently profitable for 5 years, such as the A-share market.