SEOUL: From its birth in a Beijing apartment 12 years ago, ByteDance grew into one of the world’s biggest tech firms – best known in most countries as the creator of TikTok.
But TikTok now faces a furious campaign in Washington: the House of Representatives approved of a bill on Wednesday (Mar 13) that could see the wildly popular video-sharing app banned in the United States if it does not sever itself from ByteDance.
HOW BIG IS BYTEDANCE?
ByteDance has rocketed in recent years to become one of the most valuable companies in the world, worth around US$225 billion, according to market intelligence firm CP Insights.
That puts it well above Elon Musk’s SpaceX and ChatGPT maker OpenAI.
ByteDance launched TikTok in 2017, and the app took the world by storm, crossing a billion users in four years.
The app was an international version of Douyin, which was released in China in 2016 and now has hundreds of millions of users.
Thanks to the explosive growth of these apps, ByteDance has branched out into e-commerce and travel bookings and also released a video editing app.
The Chinese company says it has more than 150,000 employees in almost 120 cities around the world.
A privately held firm, ByteDance does not release revenue and profit figures, but media estimates of its earnings put it on par with some of the biggest firms in the world.
In 2023, ByteDance’s sales crossed US$110 billion, Bloomberg reported in December, a figure greater than Chinese tech giant Tencent’s estimated revenues that year.
ByteDance did not respond to AFP queries about its revenues, including how much it earns from TikTok.
AFP, along with more than 100 fact-checking organisations, is paid by TikTok and Facebook parent Meta to verify videos that potentially contain false information.