TikTok: The world's most valuable startup that you have never heard of

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Budget 2019 : Anticipation has long been building about the impending takeover of the tech world by Chinese digital giants like Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, and JD. Efforts so far, however, have been largely disappointing. The most popular messaging app in the West is WhatsApp, not WeChat; people use PayPal, not Alipay, for digital payments; Google dominates the search market, not Baidu.
Indeed, Google, Facebook, Instagram, Snap, Spotify, and Amazon, have barely noticed the competitive impact of their Chinese equivalents. While China has found great success in global hardware markets, they have had much less success with software. That is, until now.

You may not have heard of it, but TikTok became one of 2018’s most downloaded mobile apps for Apple and Android devices in the US and Europe, unseating the likes of YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat. TikTok has already been downloaded more than 80m times in the US, logging 4m downloads from the App Store in October alone. It is also one of the most popular apps on Google Play.

What is TikTok?
TikTok is a video sharing platform with a twist. Videos can be no longer than 15 seconds and they are based on various themes: music, cooking, travel, dance, fashion, and so on. Users create these short videos, use simple tools to add music and special effects, and share them on the site. The most popular clips are high on entertainment value, with a premium on instant gratification. Similar to Vine, which shut down in 2016, TikTok can be thought of as a video version of Instagram or Snapchat.

TikTok comes from China, but, interestingly, it is not owned by one of the Chinese tech giants. Despite massive investments in video platforms by the likes of Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu, none of them dominates this area. TikTok – known locally as Douyin – was launched in 2016 by ByteDance, a Beijing-based tech company traditionally focused on news. Its news app, called Toutiao, uses advanced AI algorithms that learn user preferences, then provides customised news feeds. Bytedance uses the same algorithms to provide relevant video feeds to TikTok users.

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