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ByteDance
字節跳動
Unabashed
勇敢無畏
China’s first global software company is going from strength to strength. America doesn’t like it one bit
中國第一家全球軟件公司正在變得越來越強大。美國對此極不歡喜
As covid-19 has forced the world’s teenagers out of school and into their rooms, they have turned to a familiar digital companion, TikTok. The short-video app was downloaded 115m times in March. Its nearly 1bn regular users enjoy silly clips of dog antics alongside pandemic advice from the World Health Organisation. Collectively, TikTok videos tagged with #coronavirus have been watched 53bn times.
covid-19迫使世界各地的青少年離開學校，被困家中，于是他們將注意力轉向了一個熟悉的數字伙伴——TikTok。今年3月，這款短視頻應用的下載量達到了1.15億次。該應用有近10億的老用戶喜歡看狗狗滑稽的搞笑視頻，同時也能看到世界衛生組織提供的疫情防護建議。帶有冠狀病毒標簽的TikTok視頻總觀看量高達530億次。
TikTok’s popularity over the past two years has shone the spotlight on ByteDance, its Beijing-based developer. Founded by a Chinese computer scientist, Zhang Yiming, in 2011, it is now the world’s biggest unlisted technology “unicorn”, recently valued at between $90bn and $100bn. It is also the only technology firm bar Apple with more than 100m users in both China and America, where TikTok has taken on the likes of YouTube and Instagram.
在過去兩年中，TikTok的受歡迎程度讓位于北京的開發商字節跳動(ByteDance)備受關注。該公司由中國計算機科學家張一鳴于2011年創立，目前是全球最大的未上市的科技“獨角獸”，最近估值在900億至1000億美元之間。它也是除蘋果之外唯一一家在中國和美國都擁有超過1億用戶的科技公司，TikTok已經在YouTube和Instagram等網站上占據了一席之地。
And ByteDance isn’t done. The 60,000 people in its buzzy offices—“We are like flies,” says one former employee—crank out one app after another. In the past year it has launched a worldwide corporate-software service (Lark), a music-streaming app in India and Indonesia (Resso) and, in China, a messaging rival to WeChat. As other firms sack workers amid covid-19, ByteDance is hiring 10,000 globally. It plans to employ 30,000 on top of that this year. ByteDance is not the first Chinese firm with foreign ambitions.
字節跳動并沒有止步于此。在其喧鬧的辦公室里的6萬人——“我們就像蒼蠅一樣，”一位前員工說——還在一個接一個地開發應用程序。在過去一年里，它推出了一個全球范圍內的企業軟件服務(Lark)，一個印度和印度尼西亞的音樂流媒體應用(Resso)，還在中國推出了一款與微信競爭的通訊軟件。面對covid-19，其他公司都在解雇員工，字節跳動卻在全球雇傭了1萬名員工。該公司計劃今年再新雇3萬名員工。字節跳動并不是第一家有海外野心的中國公司。
Commodity giants such as CNOOC, an oil firm, have been buying foreign reserves, and rivals, since the 1990s. In the past decade industrial giants have pursued Western competitors from carmaking (as with Geely’s purchase of Volvo) to chemicals (ChemChina’s of Syngenta). More haphazardly, conglomerates like Fosun and Anbang splurged on trophy assets (including Club Med and the Waldorf Astoria hotel, respectively).
自上世紀90年代以來，像中海油這樣的大宗商品巨頭一直在購買外匯儲備和競爭對手。在過去的十年中，從汽車制造(如吉利收購沃爾沃)到化工(中國化工收購先正達)，工業巨頭一直在追趕西方競爭對手。更隨意的是，復星(Fosun)和安邦(Anbang)等企業集團在戰利品資產上大肆炫耀(分別包括地中海俱樂部和華爾道夫酒店)。
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