TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, strives to become a tech giant like Google and Facebook

In a letter to all the company’s employees, the chief executive stated that they are going to focus on global expansion now. Although ByteDance is under investigation currently by the US over allegations of ties with the Chinese government, Zhang is optimistic. He has told Reuters that there are a lot of misunderstandings in the current situation. Despite the company’s efforts to clean their name, for the time being TikTok is banned for use by employees of some American government entities.
Since 2013, Zhang had plans to conquer the global market, even though at the beginning the company did not have the financial means to do so. On the other hand, ByteDance’s apps were not without issues before the 2020 confrontation with some US officials - in 2018, the Chinese government shut down one of the company’s top apps, over containing “vulgar” content.
Some other apps from the company are already, to a certain extent, globalized. For instance Halo is an Indian social media app, and Lark, a productivity app for the workplace, was targeted towards the US, Europe and Japan. Unfortunately for ByteDance, due to the US’ concerns with the company’s privacy policies, the Lark app had to be reoriented to focus on markets in Japan, Singapore and India.
Even though the CEO’s plans seem quite enterprising, he states that at the moment ByteDance does not have any imminent strategy on a stock market launch.