ByteDance is now worth $300 billion, a fraction of rival Meta, despite growing faster

TikTok’s parent company ByteDance valued itself at $300 billion in a recent buyback offer, marking one of the highest valuations ever for the Chinese tech company, The Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend. That’s roughly double what AI giant OpenAI is worth, and ~5x that of e-commerce upstart Shein.

The continued uptick in the company’s valuation is perhaps no surprise given the speed of its ascent, with ByteDance’s revenue growing another ~30% last year. That took it over the $100 billion mark, a feat which only one other social media platform has achieved (Meta), and it’s showing few signs of slowing down: a report from The Information detailed that ByteDance has grown 35% in the first half of this year, which could put it on track to hit $145-150 billion in sales for 2024.

With Reuters reporting that ByteDance has no IPO plans in sight, the buyback program is a way of providing the company’s shareholders — who are sitting on a potential goldmine — with liquidity. The recent deal is the third buyback program since 2022. The round in December 2023 boosted its valuation to $268 billion.

Going vertical

You could argue that ByteDance’s valuation is not that high on a relative basis. Meta’s market cap (~$1.4 trillion) is more than 10x its latest full-year of revenue — ByteDance’s is just 2.7x its own. That reflects a few differences, including the fact that ByteDance is not a pure advertising company in quite the same way Meta is, generating a substantial portion of its sales from e-commerce (which likely produces a slimmer margin).

It might also partly reflect the prospect of a looming TikTok ban in the US, where the app has 170 million users. Largely in the context of national security concerns, President Biden signed a law this April that gave ByteDance until early January to sell TikTok or face a ban. Former president Trump once favored the pending ban but recently reversed his stance.