ByteDance’s 2021 revenue was $61.7 billion, but the company lost more than $7 billion due to marketing costs and other investments.
ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, said it has started to become profitable in a short time. But before that, financial reports showed that the business last year cost the company $7.15 billion, three times more than in 2020.
Headquartered in Beijing, ByteDance is a company that is fairly tight-lipped about their revenue. The financial statements are only sent to the employees to understand the business situation and plan for the future.
Bear huge losses
Although revenue grew by nearly 80% to nearly 61.7 billion USD in 2021, sales, marketing and communication expenses also consumed 27.4 billion USD, up 79% over the previous year. ByteDance also spent nearly 15 billion on R&D activities.
ByteDance spends heavily on product promotion and marketing activities. Photo: Getty.
The volatile stock market caused ByteDance’s investments to lose $75.6 billion, up 76% compared to 2020.
After summarizing, in 2021 ByteDance loses 7.15 billion USD, while in 2020 this amount is only 2.14 billion USD.
Besides TikTok, ByteDance is also operating many other applications and platforms such as Douyin (TikTok is the international version of Douyin), Toutiao, Today’s Healines, etc.
Positive signs have begun to appear. In the first three months of 2022, ByteDance had revenue of $18.3 billion, up 55% from last year. Although still losing, this amount has decreased to $ 4.7 billion compared to $ 29 billion in the same period in 2021.
Founded in 2012 by Zhang Yiming, ByteDance quickly showed its potential and raised billions of dollars in capital from major funds such as Sequoia, General Atlantic. The company is valued at $180 billion by the end of 2020.
Great economic potential.
Despite the business’s loss, ByteDance still pumped more than $42.6 billion in investments at the end of March this year. Total company assets increased from 64.3 billion USD at the end of last year to 74 billion USD by the end of March.
This abundant economic potential is considered a huge competitive advantage of ByteDance, promoting the outstanding development of the TikTok platform abroad, especially the US.
According to experts, no startup has the ability to pour billions of dollars into expanding the market like ByteDance. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel also recently had to announce the layoffs of a number of positions to maintain operations.
ByteDance’s financial statements are intended as a reference for a special internal stock offering for employees. By the end of 2021, ByteDance has more than 130,000 employees worldwide.
In the report, ByteDance outlines the risk factors that employees need to keep in mind when buying insider shares. One of them is that they will not have a regular stock exchange value and employees are warned that they may have to keep company shares forever.
According to an insider, ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo said the company has started to turn a profit due to its cost-cutting policies and innovative business methods. However, there are still many segments of ByteDance that are considered to have not met investors’ expectations.
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