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Business Leader of the Week: Meet Zhang Yiming, ByteDance founder & China’s new richest

IFM_Zhang Yiming
Following a brief period at Microsoft, Zhang Yiming started creating his applications and started several start-ups, one of which was a portal for real estate searches

Zhang Yiming, the founder of ByteDance, has USD 49.3 billion in personal wealth, making him the richest person in China, according to an annual rich list. His counterparts in the renewable energy and real estate sectors have not done that well.

The 41-year-old Zhang Yiming, who resigned as CEO of ByteDance in 2021, is the 18th person to be named China’s richest person in the 26 years since the Hurun China Rich List was first released. Zhong Shanshan, a bottle water tycoon, lost ground to him after his wealth fell 24% to USD 47.9 billion.

Hurun claimed that despite a legal dispute over its United States-based assets, ByteDance’s worldwide revenue increased 30% to USD 110 billion in 2023, contributing to Zhang Yiming’s personal wealth growth.

While Colin Huang, the founder of PDD Holdings, dropped from third place to fourth place last year despite his company’s discount-focused e-commerce platforms, Pinduoduo and Temu, continuing to show robust revenue growth, Pony Ma, the low-profile founder of Tencent, came in third.

The list’s number of billionaires fell by 142 to 753, more than a third of its peak in 2021.

“China’s economy and stock markets had a difficult year,” Hurun Report Chairman Rupert Hoogewerf said, while adding that China’s real estate market has seen the sharpest declines in wealth, while consumer electronics is growing quickly, with Xiaomi founder Lei Jun adding USD 5 billion to his fortune in 2024.

“Solar panel, lithium battery and EV makers have had a challenging year, as competition intensified, leading to a glut, and the threat of tariffs added to uncertainties. Solar panel makers saw their wealth drop as much as 80% from the 2021 peak, while battery and EV makers were down by half and a quarter respectively,” Hoogewerf said, who is also the list’s chief researcher.

Life And Career Of Zhang Yiming

Zhang Yiming started his career at the travel website Kuxun, which was later purchased by Tripadvisor, while majoring in microelectronics and software engineering at Nankai University.

Following a brief period at Microsoft, Zhang Yiming started creating his applications and started several start-ups, one of which was a portal for real estate searches. Zhang Yiming reportedly felt stifled by Microsoft’s corporate rules. Even though he joined the start-up Fanfou, it faced a brief failure in 2009 due to alleged censorship in China. Fanfou’s website was developed in LAMP stack with Twitter-compatible APIs. However, it reopened in November 2010.

In 2009, when Expedia was about to acquire Kuxun, Zhang Yiming took over Kuxun’s real estate search business and started 99fang.com, his first company. He quit the business three years later.

To compete with Baidu’s news offering that included advertisements, Zhang Yiming eventually concentrated his efforts on news aggregation apps in 2012.

He started with the content platform Toutiao, an AI-powered news recommendation system that, without the assistance of editorial staff, customises news according to users’ interests.

After the app quickly reached millions of downloads, Zhang Yiming collaborated with Chinese smartphone makers to incorporate it into new phone models.

Later, in 2016, ByteDance launched its short-video platform Douyin (known as TikTok in the United States).

In 2018, it successfully entered foreign markets by purchasing the well-known American app Musical Dotly for USD 1 billion and merging it with TikTok.

On November 4, 2021, Zhang Yiming stepped down as CEO of ByteDance, completing a leadership handover announced in May 2021. According to Reuters, he still maintains over 50% of ByteDance’s voting rights.

Despite GIPHY Partnership, TikTok Faces Loops Threat

Meanwhile, the largest collection of GIFs and stickers in the world, GIPHY, is collaborating with TikTok, the top platform for short-form mobile video, to improve the direct messaging experience on the platform by recommending GIFs using artificial intelligence.

The entire company of GIPHY is owned by Shutterstock, a prominent worldwide creative platform that provides top-notch creative content to marketing, digital media, and transformative brand companies.

The businesses are advancing their collaboration by incorporating GIPHY’s API straight into TikTok’s messaging app, which will give users instant access to the ideal GIF and innovative new features for TikTok’s large user base. Through this partnership, GIPHY’s extensive and carefully chosen library will offer the TikTok community a smooth and customised means of expressing themselves in chats.

“We’re incredibly excited to deepen our partnership with TikTok and bring the power of GIPHY to their direct messaging experience. This integration represents a dynamic convergence of self-expression and creative communication that will further connect TikTok’s vibrant community in authentic and engaging ways,” Jason Stein, Senior Vice President of Business and Corporate Development at GIPHY said, as reported by PR Newswire.

However, ByteDance may face competition from Fediverse (group of social media platforms that are working together through a federated protocol to allow users to communicate and interact with one another between social networks), as Loops, an open-source TikTok clone, has started to accept sign-ups, as first reported by TechCrunch.

“The short-form, looping video platform will provide an open-source alternative to TikTok in the same way that Mastodon provides an alternative option for X, formerly Twitter. Loops was created by Daniel Supernault, the founder of the open-source Instagram alternative Pixelfed. The project is being financed by user-support,” the media outlet reported.

Loops may become a game-changing experiment for the Fediverse in the coming days, as online platforms like Mastodon, WordPress, Flipboard, and even Meta’s Threads have joined the entity since 2023. By implementing Fediverse’s protocol, Threads users can choose to have their content automatically become accessible on platforms like Mastodon.

“Loops will work much like TikTok, allowing users to post short-form videos as well as comment on and share clips. However, for new users, content will be held in a moderation que as they build their trust score. This trust score will also help the platform hide certain comments and apply warning labels to clips. Users with high trust scores will be able to post content immediately without having to wait for approval,” TechCrunch reported.

As with most open-source platforms, Loops is user privacy-oriented. The platform will not sell user data to third-party advertisers or allow user content to be used to train AI.

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