By Yingzhi Yang and Xie Yu
BEIJING/HONG KONG (Reuters) – ByteDance, the owner of short video app TikTok, saw its total revenue grow by 70% year-on-year to around $58 billion in 2021, according to two people familiar with the matter, slower growth than a year earlier as China tightens its grip on big tech companies.
The figures were disclosed to a small group of employees at an internal meeting this week, according to the people.
In 2020, the Beijing-based company’s total revenue grew by over 100% to $34.3 billion, Reuters has reported.
ByteDance did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Chinese tech giants from Tencent to Alibaba have reported slowing growth amid a wide-ranging crackdown by the country’s regulators who have rolled out new rules that have impacted how such companies carry out deals and interact with their users.
The social media giant retained its second-ranked position in China’s online advertising market last year, with a market share of 21%, according to a recent report published by researcher Interactive Marketing Lab Zhongguancun.
The number one position was still held by e-commerce giant Alibaba group, and the third place went to gaming giant Tencent Holdings, according to the report.
The overall growth of online ad sales in China declined to 9.3% in 2021 from 13.8% a year earlier, the report says.
Tech news website The Information last November reported that ByteDance’s 2021 revenue was on track to rise about 60% to 400 billion yuan ($63.07 billion).
ByteDance is one of the world’s biggest private tech companies with recent trades in the private-equity secondary market valuing it at about $300 billion, Reuters has reported.
A breakdown of TikTok’s total revenue last year wasn’t available. Besides TikTok, ByteDance’s other apps include its Chinese equivalent Douyin, news aggregator Jinri Toutiao and video-streaming platform Xigua.
In 2021, users spent approximately $2.3 billion last year in TikTok and the iOS version of its Chinese version Douyin, a 77% jump year-over-year, according to app tracker Sensor Tower.
($1 = 6.3419 Chinese yuan renminbi)
(Reporting by Yingzhi Yang and Xie Yu; Editing by Brenda Goh and Elaine Hardcastle)
