ByteDance Will Hire 10k More Employees By The End of 2020
Despite a tumultuous year surrounding the drama with TikTok in the U.S., TikTok’s parent company ByteDance is doing well and is looking to fill more than 10k job positions in China by the end of 2020.
While many people in the West only know of TikTok, ByteDance actually operates many platforms including Douyin, Toutiao (今日头条) and Xigua Video (西瓜视频). So far, ByteDance has hired more than 30k employees this year in China. Adding 10k, the company will have over 100k employees worldwide. So crazy.
Most of the new job positions are related to education, games and ecommerce, which can give us an idea of ByteDance’s strategy and key growth areas. Why these three areas?
Education
According to Zhang Yiming (张一鸣), founder of ByteDance, education will be the company’s next key focus. Though the company isn’t known for education, it is building the development team and launching apps gradually, the Guagualong (瓜瓜龙) series is one of them.
Games
The game industry is covered by two players at the moment: Tencent and NetEase (网易), with 70% of the market in total. ByteDance aims to break the situation.
We know that games can be classified into two categories, one is called casual games, for example the classic link game, and the other type is moderate-intense engagement games, such as Honor of Kings (王者荣耀) and Onmyoji (阴阳师). While ByteDance has achieved great success in casual game development and 80% of these games have achieved monetization, the company still has a long way to go for those big mobile games. Reasons why this is happening is that, users who play casual games match with Douyin user base, most of them are young and fashionable females. On the other hand, if you look at Douyin’s livestream ranking board, you will find that most of the popular content is about performance, emotion and life or singing, there is barely any game livestreaming. The atmosphere is not fertilized enough to grow a big mobile game.
Ecommerce
Three main ways of monetization on the Internet are: advertisement, games and ecommerce. Douyin is always hoping to build its own ecommerce platform so that they don’t drive users to Taobao or Tmall and instead they can finish the purchasing cycle on Douyin.
In fact, another short video and livestreaming platform Kuaishou (快手) has acted faster than Douyin. Since December 2019, Taobao’s links can no longer be placed in Kuaishou content and the platform has been building its product warehouse, guiding influencers and MCNs to open stores.
But have a look at today’s main ecommerce platforms: Taobao is known for its wide range of product categories, JD is a place to go if users want to buy home appliances and Pinduoduo is known for group buying and extremely low price. Can ByteDance find a novel position in the market? We will see if this can happen.
With the expansion of its team, Byte Dance is looking for more office buildings. News about ByteDance purchasing buildings often show up. In June, the company bought land in Shenzhen worth 1.08 billion RMB to build its new office building. Outside of first tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, Byte Dance is also expanding and opening offices in second tier cities such as Wuhan (武汉), Chengdu (成都), Xiamen (厦门) and Zhengzhou (郑州).
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