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Bytedance, one of the world's most valuable startups and the operator of the popular TikTok video application, has been busy for the past two months. The Beijing-based company has continued to expand its list of apps to include the Lark Work Collaboration Tool, an instant messenger called Feiliao as well as a streaming music streaming app, and she now seems to be taking a bold step in hardware. .
Bytedance plans to develop its own smartphone, the Financial Times reported (paywalled), citing two sources. A spokesman for Bytedance declined to comment on the case, but the rumor is not surprising, as smartphone pre-installs have long been a popular way for Chinese companies to increase their user size.
It is also urgent that Bytedance separate. more channels of user acquisition. After a few years of unrestrained growth, Bytedance did not reach its sales target for the first time last year due to slower advertising spending in China, according to a report from Bloomberg.
Among the predecessors of Bytedance are selfie. the maker of applications Meitu, who builds pre-loaded smartphones with his suite of photo editors and recently sold this segment to Xiaomi, the latter trying to capture more women and newcomers, including the B612 camera app owned by Snow and the Bytedance Faceu software, nearby on Meitu's heels.
In the early days of the Chinese Internet, others have adopted a less heavyweight approach to badets. Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent – known as BAT for their supremacy in the world of technology in China – have all been working on their own custom Android ROM ROMs, with additional features compared to a standard ROM preinstalled by a manufacturer. phones.
Alibaba's ambition is also manifested by a $ 590 million investment in Meizu in 2016, which brought the e-commerce giant to the challenge of developing a system. Customized operation for the handset manufacturer. Most recently, in March, WeChat's owner, Tencent, teamed up with video game smartphone manufacturer Razor for a number of hardware initiatives.
The first indices of Bytedance's smartphone activity were known. The company confirmed in January that it had acquired some patents and some employees of the smartphone manufacturer Smartisan, although it said at the time that the agreement was concluded to "explore the education sector." It was a curious statement because the business sector of Smartisan has little to do with education. At the very least, the reconciliation confers a hardware development capability to the wireless internet that starts.
Indeed, a source told the Financial Times that Bytedance founder Zhang Yiming "had long dreamed of a phone with Bytedance. preinstalled applications. "Nevertheless, the battle is tough, at least in China, where smartphone sales are cooling and competition is intensifying between well-established players like Huawei, Vivo, Oppo, Xiaomi and Apple.
far from home, thanks to its mobile application empire. The company is one of the few Chinese start-ups that are able to gain a significant foothold globally, and many would say so in the first place. TikTok has consistently dominated the global ranking of applications in recent months, but has also encountered some hurdles in some of its larger markets.
In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission fined TikTok for violating the law on the protection of children's privacy. The Indian government, which has largely contributed to the recent growth of TikTok, has also challenged the application to ban it temporarily because of its illegal content.
While the US market may be difficult to penetrate given Washington's concerns about the security threat Chinese companies may present, India is now cluttered with Chinese brands. A study by Counterpoint revealed that during the first quarter, Chinese manufacturers led by Xiaomi controlled 66% of the smartphone market in India. This means that Bytedance, alongside its potential ally Smartisan, not only faces local rivals in India, but also the familiar faces of its domestic market.
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