What's happening in the company that developed Tiktok

CEO Zhang Yiming hands over the reins of the $ 35 billion revenue giant. But ByteDance has big growth programs

TikTok logo is seen displayed on a phone screen with ByteDance logo in the background in this illustration photo taken on August 31, 2020 in Poland. (Photo Illustration by Jakub Porzycki / NurPhoto via Getty Images) He is the fifth richest man in China, the 31st in the world, with a personal fortune of $ 44.5 billion, which has increased by 19.5 since the beginning of the year according to the index. Bloomberg yet, he writes, "I lack some qualities of the ideal manager." Thus Zhang Yiming, founder of ByteDance, explained, in a note to the 100 thousand employees of the company founded in 2012, his retirement from the role of CEO, in favor of the head of human resources, the co-founder Liang Rubo. Yiming will remain president of the company whose revenues doubled last year to a total of $ 35 billion, with plans for expansion and a possible rumored listing in the near future.

Yiming will occupy a key position at a strategic level, working alongside Rubo for the handover over the next six months, decided at a time when Beijing is trying to break the influence of Chinese billionaires, like Jack Ma and the monopoly of giants like Alibaba or Tencent. ByteDance owns TikTok, known as Douyin in China, where it also owns a news app, Toutiao. The giant has for some time been preparing a listing on the stock exchange of its Chinese assets, in the United States or in Hong Kong: the company's shares are traded privately for a total value of over 250 billion dollars, Bloomberg reports. Just last April, however, the new chief financial officer, Shouzi Chew, denied any immediate plans of this kind.

In January ByteDance launched an internal payment system in Douyin (Douyin Pay), to enable creator merchandising transactions, to be added to Alipay (Ant Group) and WeChat Pay (Tencent) services. These would be the harbingers of ByteDance's entry into a $ 1,700 billion Chinese e-commerce arena populated by actors like Alibaba and Meituan (with a similar plan for TikTok in the United States). The goal would be to bring the value of ecommerce merchandise to $ 93 billion gross, up from less than a third last year. Another is the increase in revenues from the advertising business of Douyin and Toutiao to $ 40 billion from about $ 28.4 billion in 2020 (which would be about double what YouTube raised). Finally, Douyin wants to reach 680 million active users, up from 610 in March.

In all of this, "I feel I have not achieved what I hoped for in my previous strategic, organizational and social responsibility goals," he explained Yiming. If so far the outgoing CEO has kept a low profile, he seems to want to accentuate this nature to devise new strategic lines without having to deal with the daily management of activities. “The truth is that I lack some qualities of the ideal manager. I am more interested in analyzing organizational and market principles and exploiting these theories to reduce labor management, rather than managing people. Likewise, I'm not very sociable, I prefer solitary activities like being online, reading, listening to music and meditating on what might happen ”.

In March ByteDance bought the gaming studo Moonton, to compete in the gaming market with Tencent and NetEaese. Last year, the company remained in a back and forth with the Trump administration over the divestiture of the US business of TikTok, pinpointing Oracle and Walmart as potential buyers. However, the situation remained indefinitely stalled after ByteDance launched some legal initiatives.


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Topics

China Finance Social media Social Network Tiktok globalData.fldTopic = "China, Finance, Social media, Social Networks, Tiktok "

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