Beijing ByteDance Technology Co (北京字節跳動科技), the company behind giant Chinese media start-up Jinri Toutiao (每日頭條), has acquired teen social video app Musical.ly for about US$800 million, people familiar with the deal said.
The acquisition represents the biggest venture abroad thus far for a Chinese start-up valued at US$20 billion that has already spawned one of the world’s largest news services.
ByteDance beat out rival bidders including Kuaishou (快手), the viral video streaming service, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing a private matter.
ByteDance announced the deal yesterday without citing a price tag.
The start-up gains a big US presence, adding Musical.ly’s 100 million-strong contingent of lip-synching video performers to Toutiao’s own 120 million readers and viewers, while potentially tacking on a social media component to its bread-and-butter news offering.
Musical.ly, founded in Shanghai by Louis Yang (楊陸育) and Alex Zhu (朱駿) in 2014, exploded in popularity among US teens last year and has since expanded beyond its flagship app for creating and sharing personal music videos.
Last year, it rolled out a live-streaming app called Live.ly.
The start-up struck deals with media firms including Viacom Inc and Comcast Corp’s NBCUniversal to make original shows.
Jinri Toutiao — or “Today’s Headlines” — is one of the few Chinese Internet operations to have found success without the backing of one of the country’s three biggest industry players: Tencent Holdings Ltd (騰訊), Baidu Inc (百度) and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴).
Now all three are refining their own news apps to try and steal business from Toutiao.
Toutiao aggregates news and videos from hundreds of media outlets and has become one of the world’s largest news services in the span of five years.
Its parent company was valued at more than US$20 billion, a person familiar with the matter said, on par with Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Started by Zhang Yiming (張一鳴), it is on track to pull in about US$2.5 billion in revenue this year, largely from advertising.
ByteDance wants to become a global success by turning its artificial intelligence tools on the rest of the world.
The company’s overseas efforts are now spearheaded by TopBuzz, an app similar to its core offering in China, and Flipagram, a video platform acquired in February this year.
It added to the push this week by acquiring aggregation platform News Republic from Cheetah Mobile Inc (獵豹移動), which is also an investor in Musical.ly, for US$86.6 million.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: The chipmaker last month raised its capital spending by 28 percent for this year to NT$32 billion from a previous estimate of NT$25 billion Contract chipmaker Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp (力積電子) yesterday launched a new 12-inch fab, tapping into advanced chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) packaging technology to support rising demand for artificial intelligence (AI) devices. Powerchip is to offer interposers, one of three parts in CoWoS packaging technology, with shipments scheduled for the second half of this year, Powerchip chairman Frank Huang (黃崇仁) told reporters on the sidelines of a fab inauguration ceremony in the Tongluo Science Park (銅鑼科學園區) in Miaoli County yesterday. “We are working with customers to supply CoWoS-related business, utilizing part of this new fab’s capacity,” Huang said, adding that Powerchip intended to bridge
Qualcomm Inc, the world’s biggest seller of smartphone processors, gave an upbeat forecast for sales and profit in the current period, suggesting demand for handsets is increasing after a two-year slump. Revenue in the three months ended in June will be US$8.8 billion to US$9.6 billion, the company said in a statement Wednesday. Excluding certain items, earnings will be US$2.15 to US$2.35 a share. Analysts had projected sales of US$9.08 billion and earnings of US$2.16 a share. The outlook signals that the smartphone market has begun to bounce back, tracking with Qualcomm’s forecast that demand would gradually recover this year. The San
Clambering hand-over-hand, sweat dripping into his eyes, a durian laborer expertly slices a cumbersome fruit from a tree before tossing it down to land with a soft thump in his colleague’s waiting arms about 15m below. Among Thailand’s most famous and lucrative exports, the pungent “king of fruits” is as distinctive in its smell as its spiky green-brown carapace, and has been farmed in the kingdom for hundreds of years. However, a vicious heat wave engulfing Southeast Asia has resulted in smaller yields and spiraling costs, with growers and sellers increasingly panicked as global warming damages the industry. “This year is a crisis,”