TikTok’s Chinese parent is scrambling to hang on to its hit app
America threatens to ban ByteDance’s most valuable digital property—or seize it
IN MAY BYTEDANCE, the world’s most valuable startup, leapt further ahead of other technology “unicorns”. It was valued at $140bn on the secondary market, up by nearly half from a funding round in the spring. The reason? TikTok, a short-video app that has been downloaded 2bn times. The “last sunny corner” of the internet, as it is known thanks to jolly user-generated content, is China’s first worldwide internet sensation. For ByteDance’s 37-year-old founder, Zhang Yiming, it is part of an ambition to build a global software giant.
This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “Sixty seconds of fame”
Business July 25th 2020
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- America Inc braces for an earnings bloodbath
- Corporate dealmakers emerge from pandemic hibernation
- A state tobacco monopoly looms over China’s e-cigarette makers
- MercadoLibre is a wannabe Alibaba
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