Or it may be related to the transfer of byte-beating power centers overseas.
I learned that Liu Zhen, senior vice president of Toutiao, has left. ByteDance responded that Liu Zhen left for personal reasons, and the company respected her personal wishes and wished her success.
Before joining ByteDance, Liu Zhen ’s best-known experience was in Uber China. Liu Zhen joined Uber in April 2015 and was soon appointed as the head of Uber’s China strategy. Prior to this, Liu Zhen had worked as a lawyer in Silicon Valley for nearly ten years, mainly engaged in high-tech enterprise financing, mergers and acquisitions, listing, and Sino-foreign joint ventures.
Liu Zhen and ByteDance held hands in October 2016 as senior vice president of Toutiao today. Liu Zhen’s joining was once regarded as a symbol of byte-beating internationalization strategy. Talking about the reasons for joining the beating at the beginning, Liu Zhen once said that “Zhang Yiming’s ambitions impressed me, and he can tolerate talents with diverse cultural backgrounds.”
After Liu Zhen joined, ByteDance ’s international business began to expand rapidly. In early 2017, he acquired the short video platform Flipagram, and in November of the same year acquired the music short video platform Musical.ly for $ 1 billion. This is a very critical transaction. At that time, Facebook also expressed its intention to acquire Musical.ly. If Facebook completes the acquisition, the current competitive landscape may be different.
In August 2018, Musical.ly merged into TikTok, and TikTok has grown rapidly since then. The third-party organization shows that the Sensor Tower report shows that from November 2018 to October 2019, TikTok downloads reached 640 million times. In April of this year, TikTok has exceeded 2 billion downloads. In the first quarter of this year alone, TikTok downloaded more than 307 million downloads.
In May of this year, ByteDance Internationalization had a new appointment, with Dini’s senior vice president Kay Meyer serving as ByteDance COO and TikTok Global CEO. Former TikTok President Alex Zhu was transferred to Vice President of ByteDance Products and Strategy, responsible for company strategy and product design.
According to Reuters news, ByteDance has taken a series of low-key actions in recent months, gradually shifting the decision-making and research functions of international business overseas. Several insiders revealed that TikTok pryed away Disney executive Kevin Mayer and appointed him as CEO, behind TikTok ’s parent company, ByteDance As global tensions intensify,A complete set of strategies for the transfer of force centers from China.
The source said that this strategy is not only aimed at TikTok for overseas users, but also for byte-beating other overseas businesses that are not China-centric. These overseas businesses include Indian social software Helo. These personnel changes occurred in a special period. The United States and China have frequent frictions on trade, technology, and the new crown epidemic. The relationship has become increasingly tense. Also stricter.
Byte beat internationalization has entered a new stage, and Liu Zhen has also started the next stop of his career.