ByteDance; the parent company of popular video-sharing platform TikTok had its revenue for 2020 go up more than twice the revenue for the previous year, a person who knew about the issue told CNBC.
The company’s revenue for the year 2020 ran into a total of $34.3 billion and is up 111.1% YoY. This was revealed by senior management to employees in a company-wide meeting. The figure for gross profit was $19 billion; profit went up 93 percent. This information was also revealed at the meeting.
At the end of 2020, ByteDance had a total of 1.9 billion monthly active users across all its platforms – Tiktok which is the most popular of the company’s platforms, Douyin which is the Chinese version of TikTok, news aggregation app Toutiao, etc. The private company is reportedly valued at $100 billion, some reports say the company’s valuation is more than the aforementioned figure.
According to a person who didn’t want to be named as he was not authorized to speak publicly said that the company recorded an operating loss of $2.1 billion. The operating loss from the previous year stood at $684 million. The source revealed that the loss was incurred mainly because of the cost of share-based compensation for shareholders.
Earlier this year, ByteDance employed Shou Zi Chew to be its new Chief Financial Officer and this was an intimation that it could be going for an Initial Public Offering (IPO). Shou Zi Chew was appointed as the CEO of TikTok last month, in what ByteDance called a strategic reorganization aimed at optimizing the company’s global teams. ByteDance’s co-founder; Zhang Yiming, said that the appointment will set the stage for sustained growth of the company.
While ByteDance has been able to gain ground in international markets using TikTok, the company is gearing toward new areas such as gaming. ByteDance is taking a step into the gaming business and is pitting itself with some of the biggest tech giants such as Tencent.
ByteDance was one of the companies targeted by the Donald Trump administration and was accused of sharing private information with Chinese intelligence. The company, alongside others, also faced a regulatory crackdown in China. The company was called out for an illegal collection of personal data and mandated to address that issue.
The company’s co-founder Zhang Yiming has also declared his intention to step down as ByteDance’s CEO. Liang Rubo, another co-founder has been named as his successor.
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