ByteDance profits surges past Amazon, Alibaba and Meta

TikTok parent ByteDance is proving it has staying power, posting double-digit profit growth in 2022 that surpassed most digital giants including Meta, Amazon and Alibaba.

Data published by the Financial times shows ByteDance’s earning soared 79 percent to 25 billion dollars with Bloomberg citing revenue for the year at 80 billion dollars.

As TikTok finds itself in controversial waters with regions including the US proposing to ban the shortform video app, Italy, Norway and Netherlands are the latest nations to ban the app on government phones over security issues. Social media users, however, cannot seem to get enough.

Data drives profits

ByteDance's founder, Zhang Yiming, told the Harvard Business Review (HBR) that the company's most fundamental competitive advantage is its data-driven organizational culture. Its foray into short video, for example, was driven by one executive noting that time spent viewing videos had increased sharply on Toutiao, a Chinese mobile platform of content creation.

TikTok has over 1.53 billion users as of 2023, with 1.05 billion out of those are monthly active users. That equates to 30.25 percent of the world’s internet users. Over 1 billion videos are watched every day on TikTok.

Article source: Harvard Business Review, Bloomberg, Demand Sage, Financial Times