Zhang Yiming and his ByteDance
Speaking of China’s Big Three Internet companies, they are Baidu, Ali and Tencent, and the new Big Three should be Meituan, Didi and Toutiao. Now let’s learn about the story of Zhang Yiming, CEO of Toutiao.
1. Introduction to the Founder
Zhang Yiming was born in Longyan, Fujian Province in 1983. He is a Chinese Internet entrepreneur and former chairman and CEO of ByteDance. He was admitted to Nankai University in 2001, and switched from microelectronics major to software engineering major during college. Joined Kuxun.cn in February 2006, and joined Microsoft in 2008. In October 2009, he started his own business for the first time, establishing Jiujiufang, a real estate search engine company. In 2012, he founded ByteDance. Its products include Toutiao, TikTok and Vigo Video, etc. In the 2019 Forbes China Rich List, Zhang Yiming ranked tenth on the list with 114.55 billion RMB.
2. Development of ByteDance
In 2011, Zhang Yiming observed that during that period, smartphone sales in China exploded. He believes that smartphones will replace newspapers and become the most important medium for information dissemination. So he resigned as CEO of Jiujiufang and founded ByteDance in 2012. The company he founded has a very interesting name, bytedance. As the name suggests, company products are related to data. Bytedance developed Toutiao’s mobile app, which became the fastest-growing news client in China at that time. In addition to Toutiao, Bytedance also has many well-known mobile applications.
Zhang Yiming believes that artificial intelligence can be used to recommend content of interest to users. In other words, the way to obtain information will no longer be the manual editing mode adopted by traditional media, but more intelligent and personalized automatic recommendation, and the recommendation engine will begin to show its technical advantages. Toutiao founded by Zhang Yiming have no editorial team, no manual intervention on the content, and rely entirely on algorithmic learning for personalized machine recommendations. The core competitiveness and advantage of Toutiao lies in machine distribution and personalized recommendations based on big data. It is not only a news client, but also an information distribution platform, and a technology company with media attributes. Content transfer is to let 1,000 people see 1,000 different versions through algorithms and big data mining. It can calculate the recommendation results within 0.1 seconds, complete article extraction, mining, deduplication, and classification within 3 seconds, calculate the distribution of new user interests within 5 seconds, and push them to the user terminal within 10 seconds. Since the launch of Toutiao in August 2014, the number of subscribers has exceeded 10 million in just 90 days.
Around September 2016, ByteDance launched Tik Tok in China. Users can use Tik Tok to take and edit short 15-second videos, add filters, and share them on platforms such as Weibo or WeChat. Later, Tik Tok also made an international version. It can be said to be popular all over the world.
ByteDance owns products such as Toutiao, Vigo Video and Tik Tok. As of 2018, ByteDance’s mobile app has more than 1 billion monthly users and a valuation of $75 billion, surpassing Uber to become the world’s most valuable start-up company. Zhang Yiming ranked tenth on the 2019 Forbes China Rich List with a wealth of 114.55 billion RMB. ByteDance’s revenue in 2019 is about 104 RMB to 140 billion RMB, more than the sum of Uber, Snapchat and Twitter. Advertising revenue also surpassed Tencent, second only to Alibaba. Tik Tok has been downloaded 115 million times and has nearly 1 billion regular users.
From the perspective of investors, ByteDance is also very popular in the market. In July 2012, Toutiao received millions of dollars in Series A investment from SIG Haina Asia. In September 2013, it received tens of millions of dollars in Series B investment from DST and others. On June 3, 2014, Toutiao completed its C round of financing.
On May 20, 2021, Zhang Yiming announced his resignation as CEO of ByteDance.
3. Internationalization of ByteDance
TikTok’s C.E.O. Navigates the Limits of His Power
Going overseas is currently one of the paths for Chinese Internet companies to find incremental markets. Many major companies have already started to deploy overseas. For example, ByteDance has taken many measures when going overseas, such as deploying cross-border e-commerce, launching independent websites, and so on.
ByteDance has been more successful in attracting younger audiences abroad. ByteDance is favored by users in the United States, Southeast Asia, Japan and other places. Apart from Apple, ByteDance is also the only technology company with more than 100 million users in both China and Western countries. In the US, TikTok is considered a competitor to YouTube and Instagram. At present, there are two main paths for ByteDance to go overseas. One is to be an independent website, and the other is to deploy TikTok e-commerce. They all rely on TikTok’s huge traffic pool.
The second half of 2020 is an important period for the development of TikTok. First, it reached a close cooperation with Shopify, and then cooperated with Wal-Mart to realize the first live delivery overseas. By 2021, TikTok will take the lead in launching local store projects in Indonesia and the United Kingdom. By 2022, the development will begin to accelerate. In the first half of the year, TikTok e-commerce launched local and cross-border businesses in Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore, and introduced preferential policies such as one-month commission exemption for new sellers to attract merchants. Cross-border e-commerce has been upgraded to ByteDance’s key new business. At the end of September 2022, Bytedance’s fast fashion cross-border independent station IfYooou entered the market. IfYooou is an international DTC fashion lifestyle website integrating women’s clothing, accessories, and home products. From the perspective of positioning, IfYooou can compete with SHEIN..
In overseas markets, ByteDance can be said to be the most successful and currently largest e-commerce company in China. Almost every year there are new activities in the international market.
