The president and co-founder of ByteDance, owner of TikTok, unexpectedly announced his resignation. With a $ 36 billion bank account, Zhang Yiming, born in 1983, was China’s richest last year, according to Forbes. In an email to employees, Zhang said he wanted to focus on the group’s “long-term strategy”.
“Actually, I don’t have the qualities of the ideal leader. I’m not very sociable, I prefer solitary activities like surfing the Internet, reading, listening to music and fantasizing about what’s possible, ”he wrote. It passes the hand to Liang Rubo, also co-founder of ByteDance, hitherto responsible for human resources.
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Pressing on Chinese tech giants
The announcement comes as Chinese authorities tightened control over the web to limit the influence of the tech giants. In fact, China has launched a squeeze on the booming hi-tech sector, imposing fines, including on ByteDance, for the alleged violation of monopoly rules and admonishing the Internet giants about responsibility towards society. Zhang has also been subjected to tremendous pressure from former US President Donald Trump’s administration to convince the world that TikTok will not hand over the data to the Chinese Communist Party, while protecting its image on the domestic front by not giving the impression of giving in. requests from the West.
One billion users worldwide
ByteDance was among 34 tech companies summoned by Chinese regulators in April that were told to undergo a “full rectification” and “heed the warning” from Alibaba, sanctioned with an antitrust fine of 2.8 billion. dollars for abuse of dominance. TikTok has approximately one billion users worldwide, including over 100 million in the United States, where the Trump administration made a number of requests to the Chinese company for security concerns, including the forced sale of American operations to avoid the risk of closing.
In contrast, the company has insisted that it will never provide user data to the Chinese government: ByteDance has more than 60,000 employees in 30 countries, and last year Zhang said they were trying to recruit about 40,000 more. Managed products also include Douyin, the Mandarin version of TikTok, as well as the Jinri Toutiao news aggregation app and the Lark productivity app, which offers cloud storage, chat and calendar functions.