In a stamping validation of a rather unique product portfolio that Chinese unicorn Bytedance possesses, a report from Reuters — citing sources — suggests that the TikTok owner is expecting a better-than-estimated revenue of close to $7 Billion, for the first half of 2019.
In fact, such has been the run for the company, that it has reportedly turned profitable in June and could well continue to amass better profits going forward. Sources further added, that such accelerated growth has led the Beijing-based startup to revise its revenue target for 2019 to 120 billion yuan from an earlier goal set late last year of 100 billion yuan.
While no official revenue figures for last year or this year are available, The Information had suggested a figure close to $7.2 Billion as revenues for Bytedance in 2018. There is no official word on those figures though. Bytedance’s speculated valuation at the last private financing round that it raised, was close to $78 Billion.
Bytedance, ever since its inception in 2012, has taken an approach of forming a gamut of products and services in the social networking and online content domain. This is unlike the approach much of US-based companies have taken — scaling up a single product and then diversifying. Bytedance has assets across social networking and news, which are currently spread across Mainland China and India. The company recently announced big plans to open up its own data center in India.
Analysts have called ByteDance a strong threat to other Chinese tech industry firms including social media and gaming giant Tencent Holdings Ltd and search engine leader Baidu Inc. Globally, ByteDance’s apps have 1.5 billion monthly active users and 700 million daily active users, the company said in July. The company more recently challenged Baidu — the search engine of choice in China — by launching a search engine that sits within Toutiao.
While Bytedance came to be notoriously known for apps like TikTok (which has been banned in parts of India by district administrations), it has quickly diversified into news content to improve reputation. It invested in DailyHunt, which is India’s largest aggregator for news, offered in almost all Indian languages. The company recently acquired a Chinese Wikipedia-like website called Baike.com to further boost content.
