抖音（dou yin）, or TikTok as it’s known overseas, is a popular social app with short videos that can be viewed on smartphones and is created and run by the Beijing-based Chinese company ByteDance（字节跳动）. The app is positioned as a short music video community suitable for Chinese young people, and the content is mainly generated by its users (UGC). TikTok has grown rapidly since 2017, becoming the number one downloaded and installed app in the US, and has been hugely popular in Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, Germany, France and Russia.
Many investors around the world have been waiting for Tiktok’s parent company, Bytedance, to go public and share in the company’s growth. So is Bytedance a public company now? What’s its ticker symbol?
According to Usstockwatcher.com, as of May 23, 2021, Bytedance was still rumored to be planning an IPO in the United States or Hong Kong, but these rumors were officially denied by Bytedance in late April 2021. Bytedance said: “There has been a lot of news about the company going public recently. After careful study, we believe that the company does not have the conditions to go public for the time being, and we have no plans to go public at present.” Since Bytedance is not officially public yet, its ticker symbol has yet to be determined.
Bytedance has now raised more than $7 billion in eight rounds of funding, according to the company. Bytedance’s shareholders include Sequoia Capital China, SoftBank Vision Fund, Yunfeng Fund, KKR and other famous institutional investors. Bytedance was valued at around $400 billion in April 2021. The number of overseas users of TikTok is estimated to be close to 700 million, according to foreign media analysis. Adding In Chinese users of Douyin, the total number of active users could be closer to 1.3 billion.