Bisnis.com, JAKARTA – ByteDance is currently under discussion, after it was revealed that TikTok’s parent company laid off hundreds of its employees across various departments at the end of 2022.

Of course, business optimization cuts in China’s tech sector are already commonplace.

Interestingly, as a private company, ByteDance itself is one of China’s largest tech employers, with over 100,000 employees worldwide.

So, what does ByteDance’s business profile look like? Here is a review Company Following.

ByteDance Owner Profile

Beijing ByteDance Technology is an internet technology company founded by Zhang Yiming since 2012 and headquartered in Beijing.

Zhang himself has a degree in software engineering, notably from Nankai University in Beijing.

In addition to mastering the field of software engineering, Zhang is also very fond of the business field. No wonder he decided to venture into the tech business world.

Zhang worked for several companies, then with his partner Liang Rubo in 2009, he founded the startup 99fang, a failing real estate search engine.

ByteDance business development

Despite the failure, Zhang did not give up. He also launched the ByteDance app, Neihan Duanzi, a platform for sharing jokes, memes and humorous videos. But the app was shut down in 2018 due to issues with the Chinese government.

Later, he refounded Douyin, a short video app. Although at the beginning of its appearance, the site quickly exploded and became a popular news medium in China, especially in China. However, many also underestimate Douyin as they are only seen as a “copycat” of a similar app which is more popular around the world, namely Musical.ly.

But surprisingly, ByteDance was able to acquire Musical.ly in 2018 and released a new brand of apps, namely TikTok.

It was not until 2015 that ByteDance again created another application in the form of entertainment, namely TikTok. Finally, TikTok has also managed to catch the attention of Internet users around the world.

From there, the world just learned that ByteDance already has 1.9 billion monthly active users across all of its platforms.

In fact, it is known that there are also many other apps developed by ByteDance which are also popular and used by many people around the world such as Helo (an Indian social networking app), Vigo Video (formerly Hypstar) , Douyin (equivalent to TikTok in Chinese), BaBe (Indonesian news and content platform) and Huoshan (Chinese short video app)

TikTok is key to ByteDance’s success

ByteDance’s path to success has not been easy, even some of the products it has launched have often encountered difficulties.

Launched from Zippia, ByteDance itself has been accused of cooperating with the Chinese Communist Party to censor and monitor content related to Xinjiang’s re-education camps and other topics deemed controversial by the Party.

It was even claimed that one of his apps, Helo, was an Indian-language news app spreading false information, so Zang eventually filed a defamation suit.

Not only that, TikTok has also been blocked by the US and Indian governments due to indications of illegal collection of user data and the issue of pornographic content.

So many doubted that TikTok could succeed on a global scale, but it turns out ByteDance has proven they can. Evidently, at the start of this year, ByteDance generated revenues of over US$7 billion or the equivalent of Rp109 trillion.

Now, several companies such as Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, SoftBank Group, Sequoia Capital, General Atlantic, and Hillhouse Capital Group are providing financial support to ByteDance, which is valued at US$250 billion or the equivalent of IDR 3,901 trillion in private transactions in March 2021.

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