About 60 employees were laid off, mostly in the company’s sales and advertising division, according to a company spokesperson, who attributed the shakeup to a routine reorganization. The eliminated roles include workers in Los Angeles, New York, Austin and abroad. The firm has been hit by a slowing Chinese economy and by stricter domestic regulation in the internet sector. ByteDance, which was founded in 2012, has been tipped to go public for the last few years, but has faced an increasing number of headwinds. The latest round of buybacks for shareholders comes just under a month after ByteDance offered to repurchase restricted stock units (RSU) or options from employees for the same price of $160 per share.
The report said the data that TikTok can access on your phone includes device location, calendar, contacts and other running applications. And while TikTok has taken steps to distance itself from its Beijing parent company, both the Trump administration and some Republicans https://bigbostrade.com/ and Democrats in Congress fear the Chinese Communist Party could use TikTok as a tool to spy on Americans. ByteDance is the developer of the video-sharing social networking services and apps TikTok and Douyin, the Chinese-specific counterpart to TikTok.
- It follows 2023, which was a punishing year for the tech industry, seeing the elimination of some 260,000 jobs in the tech sector, the highest reduction in tech jobs since mass terminations fueled by the pandemic.
- Driven by the success of TikTok and their other apps, ByteDance’s yearly revenue ballooned to $80 billion in 2022.
- ByteDance is based in Beijing but registered in the Cayman Islands, as is common for privately owned Chinese companies.
- Founded by Chinese entrepreneur Zhang Yiming in 2012, ByteDance is said to be valued at around $220 billion — nearly half of its 2021 valuation of $400 billion.
- And in doing so, it’s planting a flag in a market where some of its biggest American competitors have their own science, research or health-focused initiatives underway and edging into their AI research talent pool.
ByteDance was founded in 2012 by a team led by Yiming Zhang and Rubo Liang, who saw opportunities in the then-nascent mobile internet market, and aspired to build platforms that could enrich people’s lives. The company launched Toutiao, one of its flagship products, in August 2012. It followed that success with the launch of Douyin in September 2016.
The New Hampshire Department of Justice is investigating this robocall. It’s not year clear what’s going on with the ban, but ByteDance’s business didn’t skip a beat last year… in fact, the company’s revenue doubled to ~$37B in 2020, according to The Information. Expert Collections are analyst-curated lists that highlight the companies you need to know in the most important technology spaces.
China
It has used crackdowns to tighten control over technology companies and force them to align with its goals. Chew, a native of Singapore, told the lawmakers that TikTok prioritizes user safety as he sought to avert a U.S. ban on the app by downplaying its ties to China. But ByteDance’s segue into the sciences could also simply be a way for the Chinese company to improve its goodwill in the U.S. as talks of a TikTok ban loom and the app faces heavy scrutiny for its effect on the American public and discourse, he added. This is not the first time that ByteDance—which established the ByteDance AI Lab in 2016—has ventured into industries that seemingly have little to do with TikTok, Douyin and social media more broadly. The company says it has more than 150 million active users in the U.S. And at $225 billion, ByteDance is estimated to be the most valuable private company in the world.
“The Communist Party doesn’t have voting rights in ByteDance,” Chew said. In China, so-called golden shares held by official investment funds are one way for Beijing to gain more oversight over business by giving them a 1% stake in companies. In November, TikTok’s head of privacy for Europe said some employees in China had access to information about users in Britain and the European Union. What’s different now, though, is that ByteDance appears to be expanding those efforts beyond China into the United States—hiring scientists and PhDs in at least three major U.S. cities. And in doing so, it’s planting a flag in a market where some of its biggest American competitors have their own science, research or health-focused initiatives underway and edging into their AI research talent pool. Driven by the success of TikTok and their other apps, ByteDance’s yearly revenue ballooned to $80 billion in 2022.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg called “the Year of Efficiency,” and the cost-trimming spree is still unfolding. But most Silicon Valley analysts expect the downsizing to be far smaller and more targeted than last year. Buybacks by private companies are often a way for shareholders to make a return on their early investments, especially when there is no liquidity event like an initial public offering or acquisition. AI experts have warned for years about the proliferation of deepfakes as the technology improves. Recently, a robocall with a deepfake of Biden told people not to vote in the New Hampshire primary.
Northwestern Polytechnical University is not affiliated with Northwestern University in the US. TikTok’s growth and strategy, which are led by ByteDance teams, report not to Mr. Chew but to ByteDance’s office in Beijing, they said. But experts and analysts differ in their assessments of the TikTok data issue. Mere weeks after the UK lawmakers expressed their concern, the director of UK spy agency GCHQ, Jeremy Fleming, said he would encourage young people to use TikTok. This reflects a British security establishment view that the app is not problematic because it does not process data in China.
Other apps
“Social media pages are a great source of personal detail” for spy agencies, Lewis says, adding that intelligence is now a “big data” game. “Since beginning transparency reporting in 2019, we have received zero data requests from the Chinese government,” a TikTok spokesperson added. TikTok’s approach to data gathering is more aggressive than WeChat, the Chinese super app that performs multiple functions from messaging to ride-hailing, according to David Robinson, co-chief executive of Internet 2.0. In the US, Donald Trump in August 2020 signed an executive order that blocked people from downloading the app, which was followed by an order for TikTok to sell its US business. The distrust has already been expressed in scrutiny from regulators and politicians around the world, worried about the amount of data TikTok collects and whether Chinese authorities have access to it. A US trading firm reportedly owns 15% of TikTok-owner ByteDance, a stake potentially worth more than $15 billion.
Legislation was also introduced that could lead to a national ban of the platform altogether. TikTok is one of the most popular apps in U.S., and it has about 7,000 employees in the country. Its China-based parent company, the tech giant ByteDance, has more than 150,000 workers spread across the globe.
TikTok parent ByteDance offers share buyback valuing the Chinese giant at $268 billion
US trading firm Susquehanna reportedly owns 15% of TikTok-owner ByteDance, a stake that is potentially worth more than $15 billion. ByteDance took a larger piece of the digital advertising market than fellow Chinese companies like Tencent and Baidu during the first half of 2019. ByteDance has overtaken Baidu to become the second-largest performer in China. ByteDance forex scalping signals took 23% of all digital media to spend in the first half of the year 2019, which is equivalent to $7 billion. However, a spokesperson for ByteDance said that it is not working on a smartphone — but it is developing other hardware related to education. Earlier this year, ByteDance acquired some patents and the team behind a Chinese smartphone brand called Smartisan.
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According to analytics firm data.ai, which produced the 16tn estimate, there are 112 million TikTok iPhone and Android users in the US. Both Democratic and Republican lawmakers have in recent months called for stricter regulation and inquiry. ByteDance also launched Toutiao, a news aggregation app which uses algorithms to suggest articles and videos to users, in 2012. It’s one of the largest news aggregation apps in China and is installed on over 250 million monthly unique devices, according to data from Chinese market research firm, iResearch.
While TikTok’s ties to ByteDance have for years kept the service in the crosshairs of officials in Washington over national security fears, its growth has been immense. “TikTok is led by its own global C.E.O., Shou Zi Chew, a Singaporean based in Singapore,” TikTok wrote in a June letter to U.S. lawmakers. For others, data is less of a concern than the platform’s potential for manipulation of opinion.
Triller is an AI-powered music video app in the entertainment and technology industry. The company’s main service allows users to create professional-looking videos in seconds, with a focus on music, and share them across various social media platforms. Triller primarily caters to the social media and entertainment sectors. The company offers a short video application that allows users to create and share music videos, dialogue dubbing videos, funny videos, and dance videos.
The company has more than 150,000 employees and operates offices worldwide. ByteDance has over 150,000 employees based out of nearly 120 cities globally, including Austin, Barcelona, Beijing, Berlin, Dubai, Dublin, Hong Kong, Jakarta, London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Seattle, Seoul, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Singapore, and Tokyo. So far in 2024, there have been more than 10,000 tech jobs shed, according to tech job tracker site layoffs.fyi. It follows 2023, which was a punishing year for the tech industry, seeing the elimination of some 260,000 jobs in the tech sector, the highest reduction in tech jobs since mass terminations fueled by the pandemic.
