Author: Xiaoyan

Recently, middle-level employees at ByteDance may have been pondering a question: should they sell a portion of the company's stock?

As is well known, ByteDance is an influential company giant and has been rated as the "world's most valuable unicorn company." However, ByteDance has not yet gone public and has always maintained strict confidentiality about its financial situation, never disclosing any performance to the outside world. However, recently, ByteDance proactively shared financial information, not only providing detailed financial data for the full year of 2021, 2022, and the first quarter of 2023, but also proposing to repurchase employee stock options at a price of $160 per share.

This rare financial exposure has attracted attention and discussion from the public, satisfying everyone's curiosity. After all, everyone wants to know what kind of performance this social media giant has achieved so far and what plans and layouts it will have in the future.

ByteDance's financial status: Revenue continues to rise, with a slowing growth rate.

According to information provided by The Wall Street Journal, ByteDance has turned losses into profits with steady revenue growth since suffering a $7 billion operating loss in 2021. In 2022, the company's total revenue reached $85.2 billion, a 38% year-on-year increase. Although this growth rate is significantly lower than the 80% in the same period of the previous year, it still generated over $20 billion in operating profit. In the first quarter of 2023, ByteDance continued to maintain strong growth momentum, with revenue approaching $24.5 billion, a nearly 34% year-on-year increase, and a profit of nearly $6 billion, almost double that of the same period last year. However, while revenue is growing, ByteDance also faces rising costs. The company has subsequently begun a series of cost control measures, such as reducing management, marketing, and R&D costs.

Despite high cost expenditures and a slowing growth rate, overall, ByteDance's financial performance remains impressive. From some perspectives, its revenue has already surpassed that of the world's third-largest internet company, Meta. This once-upstart has long since joined the ranks of the world's top companies.

At the same time, ByteDance actively encourages employees to sell their stock options. Current and former employees affected by layoffs can receive a repurchase price of $160 per share, while voluntarily departing former employees can only sell at a price of $128 per share. According to official information disclosed by the company, ByteDance currently has 1.4 billion outstanding shares, which means its current valuation is $223.5 billion, a decrease of about 26% from the $300 billion valuation proposed for repurchasing investor shares a year ago.

Faced with the decline in ByteDance's valuation, many employees have become somewhat aware of the crisis and have begun to consider selling their stock options. So the question arises: will ByteDance's future development be affected? What adjustments will it make?

Under the influence of complex and multiple factors, ByteDance will demonstrate ambition in the field of AI.

Whether it's the slowing growth of revenue or the overall decline in valuation, these are not things that ByteDance can completely control through its own efforts. After all, this is an extremely large international company, and the influences it faces are also complex and multiple. In the current environment, in order to seek more opportunities, it is likely to make more efforts and attempts in the field of AI.

The reasons for this are, on the one hand, the pressure from international competitors. In the field of social media, ByteDance has always had to deal with fierce competition from competitors such as Meta, Google, and Snap. Since the beginning of this year, these tech giants have made strong layouts in AI and language large models, coupled with intense publicity campaigns and efficient R&D efficiency, undoubtedly attracting attention globally. If ByteDance does not make some changes and innovations at this time, its competitiveness will be greatly weakened.

On the other hand, domestic giants are also eyeing this big cake. Previously, domestic giants such as Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and 360 have all made investments in the AI race. Most of them will first release a general large model or several industry large model bases, and then provide industry customers with refined adjustments based on these basic models and their own industry data, essentially providing AI applications that serve their own businesses.

Huawei has gone even further in the field of AI. Currently, Huawei has disclosed the details of its PanGu large model, which is divided into three layers. Enterprise users can choose a suitable large model for development, upgrade, or refinement according to their business needs, thus adapting to the changing needs of various industries.

The active layouts and practices of peers will prompt ByteDance to make changes and embark on the path of developing AI.

In the field of AI, what approach will ByteDance take?

However, ByteDance's approach to AI differs greatly from that of other giants.

Most companies investing in AI will exert great efforts at the beginning, seizing the opportunity of large models to occupy high ground and establish their position in the field of AI and vertical industries as much as possible. In contrast, ByteDance cares more about the end-user experience. For ByteDance, traffic means everything. It rises because of traffic and therefore pays more attention to cultivating and maintaining traffic.

For example, the AI painting that went viral on Douyin is an excellent case of ByteDance using AI technology to create traffic. Users only need to input an image, and AI will generate a cartoon-style image based on the picture. Because the generated image has a certain "blind box" attribute, with delicate and beautiful style mixed with a bit of cute and absurdity, it has sparked the participation of a large number of users as soon as it went online. In addition to AI painting, AIGC features have also been frequently added to ByteDance's products such as Douyin and Toutiao, creating huge traffic.

Therefore, it is not difficult to see that despite heavy external competition, ByteDance is very clear-minded and has a highly targeted and forward-looking approach in the field of AI. Although low-key, it is steady and yields considerable returns.

More importantly, being low-key does not mean being idle. According to insiders, ByteDance has already built an AI ecosystem of "visual language models + Volcano high-speed training engine + Volcano machine learning platform + industry applications," achieving improvements and breakthroughs at the model, computing power, and platform levels.

Many internet giants and major companies have entered the AI race, mainly by seizing the To B end and building large models. At this time, ByteDance has taken a different path, showing a strong intention to seize opportunities. As spectators, we are also curious whether ByteDance can break the industry and customer's inherent perceptions and achieve overtaking on the bend in this new AI race.

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。