National security concerns about the collection of user data led the U.S. government to ban the app from being installed on government-issued devices. Legislation was also introduced that could lead to a national ban of the platform altogether. On Monday, Tencent cofounder and CEO Pony Ma told staff that the company’s video game business “achieved nothing” last year. He complained that Tencent’s new games did not perform as well as expected, reports Reuters. While Tencent’s staple hits like Honor of Kings and PUBG Mobile continue to deliver strong revenue, the company’s newer games are losing to those from other Chinese developers like NetEase and MiHoYo, developer of Genshin Impact. Some of these issues may be addressed in the forthcoming national security deal led by CFIUS.
- Despite the company’s grandiose success, ByteDance has faced international scrutiny as a result of accusations that the company imposes censorship in favour of the Chinese government.
- PDD reported 94% year-on-year revenue growth for the quarter ended Sept. 30, and shares of PDD are up more than 20% in the past year contrasted with a drop in over 30% for Alibaba and over 60% for JD.com.
- Though the growing hate for China has led to ByteDance losing many users, but from the startup point of view, ByteDance no doubt has done a commendable job, as it rose to be the ‘World’s most valuable startup’, just within 8 years of its inception.
- Ricard Liu, chairman and founder of JD.com, told employees not to “lie flat,” referring to the Chinese slang term of doing the bare minimum to get by, in a post on the company’s internal discussion board.
- Douyin and TikTok are two separate entities, although some metrics firms club their numbers.
“The goal of this acquisition is to incorporate the team’s strength to build upon ByteDance’s initiatives in the education space, specifically for upcoming education hardware,” the spokesperson told CNBC. “As part of this acquisition, the team will be maintaining the Smartisan brand, only in China, for existing smartphone owners.” In March, its subsidiary Lark Technologies launched a product called Lark, a productivity and workplace collaboration tool.
TikTok is an app platform that allows users to post short-form videos and share content from their cell phones. TikTok uses advanced algorithmic methods to predict which videos users will enjoy and thus create a personalized assortment of videos for them to peruse on their “For You” page (FYP). The platform also serves as one of China’s two major digital payment processors, alongside Ant Group’s Alipay. Ma reportedly told staff from the company’s digital payments service unit to reduce its share in the market, and that the company should be viewed as “a partner of banks.” The enterprise messaging and collaboration platform was originally created by ByteDance to meet its internal work demands around 2016.
It is unclear from the materials whether data about these Americans was actually collected; however, the plan was for a Beijing-based ByteDance team to obtain location data from U.S. users’ devices. But intelligence and business experts say ByteDance’s move into payments stands out because of the current geopolitical climate and widespread fears about TikTok’s handling of Americans’ data, given its ties to China. Both Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and FBI Director Christopher Wray late last year spoke out publicly about the national security concerns surrounding TikTok. Launched in the same year as Douyin, the app was originally named “Huoshan Xiaoshipin” and focuses on videos lasting only around 15 seconds. Although there is inevitably overlap between the app and Douyin in terms of content, Huoshan is aimed at attracting older users from smaller cities, while Douyin counts mostly young working professionals or university students in big cities as its users. ByteDance merged Huoshan with Douyin (link in Chinese) in early January, saying the two would continue to operate as independent entities but their content would be shared on each other’s platforms.
What does ByteDance mean?
Neither company would comment on the partnership itself or when it began. This J.P. Morgan technology, enabled in the U.S. and Europe, now “covers approximately one-fifth of TikTok’s 1 billion active users worldwide.” The payment system also “allows real-time exchange of data between ByteDance and J.P. Neither company would say who has access to that sensitive data and what type of monitoring is occurring. Perhaps the company’s most famous app is Douyin which was launched in 2016. In July 2018, ByteDance said Douyin and TikTok had 500 million monthly average users (MAUs). That number could now be higher because the company said in January that Douyin alone had 500 million MAUs in China.
ByteDance—Founder & Team
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 https://traderoom.info/ 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.
In this article, the authors explain the many ways in which ByteDance has used its SSP to fuel development and growth. It is unclear what role ByteDance’s Internal Audit team will play in TikTok’s efforts to limit China-based employees’ access to U.S. user data, especially given the team’s plans to monitor some American citizens’ locations using the TikTok app. The team primarily conducts investigations into potential misconduct by current and former ByteDance employees. But in at least two cases, the Internal Audit team also planned to collect TikTok data about the location of a U.S. citizen who had never had an employment relationship with the company, the materials show.
Despite rising concerns, a blanket American ban on the app is unlikely, Eurasia Group’s Lu said, citing its popularity as a search engine and the large volume of American businesses that operate on the platform. A more likely local businesses hiring near me outcome of the deal is increased restrictions or a spin-off to mitigate the Chinese ownership risk, she said. Lu thinks the agreement will embolden more U.S. businesses to work with ByteDance—rather than scare them away.
TikTok’s Parent ByteDance Pushes Into Payments With Help From J.P. Morgan
“Like most companies our size, we have an internal audit function responsible for objectively auditing and evaluating the company and our employees’ adherence to our codes of conduct,” said ByteDance spokesperson Jennifer Banks in a statement. The internal audit team uses a data request system known to employees as the “green channel,” according to documents and records from Lark, ByteDance’s internal office management software. These documents and records show that “green channel” requests for information about U.S. employees have pulled that data from mainland China. In the meantime, the firm has prided itself on its “flat” internal organization with a flurry of self-governing products.
These promises are part of Project Texas, TikTok’s massive effort to rebuild its internal systems so that China-based employees will not be able to access a swath of “protected” identifying user data about U.S. This effort is central to the company’s national security negotiations with CFIUS. Morgan executive Kingsley Lam, who after more than a decade at the bank left in 2020 to oversee global payments, for the Americas and Europe, at TikTok and ByteDance, according to LinkedIn (he did not respond to an interview request). Morgan employees have decamped for ByteDance’s global payments team, including executives in the United Kingdom, Shanghai and Beijing, according to LinkedIn. Together these apps account for 1.5 billion monthly active users, the company says, and about 700 million daily active users.
What is ByteDance?
An active user typically spent more than 60 minutes a day on the platform, only second to Tencent’s Wechat, a social network app for everyday communications. By the August 2016, Toutiao‘s daily active users (DAU) surpassed 60 million, with total users of over 550 million. During 2016, Toutiao also aggressively encouraged content generators such as writers, news reporters and KOLs to set up their accounts on the platform. Leveraging its huge user base, Toutiao shared revenue with the content generators similarly to Youtube, to attract exclusive content and further building its competitive moat. The success of ByteDance began with the rise of Toutiao, which is now the biggest news aggregator in China. 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.
In the year 2006, Yimimg became the fifth employee and first engineer at the travel website Kuxun. In 2008, Yiming joined Microsoft, however found it tough to cope up with the company rules of Microsoft which made him leave Microsoft to join Fanfou (Twitter clone in China). In 2009, Fanfou was shut down owing to certain controversies, and that very year, Yiming started his very first startup 99fang.com, which is a real estate search portal. Meanwhile, smartphones began to take over and more and more people started using smartphones, and Yiming could very well see the opportunity underlying it, which made him leave 99fang.com to start ByteDance in 2012.