ByteDance is a Chinese company best known for creating TikTok, a highly-popular social media video application for creating and sharing short videos. Well, it seems like ByteDance is planning to get into the smartphone business, reports Reuters.
The source reports that ByteDance Ltd said that it is developing a smartphone, and this announcement comes right after a deal ByteDance made with a Chinese smartphone maker, Smartisan.
ByteDance is planning to expand beyond video and news applications, and try its luck in the hardware sector. Competition in the smartphone world is immense, there’s no denying that, and many companies have already failed to make their mark, so it remains to be seen what will ByteDance do differently to appeal to consumers.
According to the info provided by Caijing, this smartphone has been in development for seven months, reports Reuters. The whole project is being led by Wu Dezhous, a former executive at Smartisan.
Now, regarding ByteDance’s deal with Smartisan. Earlier this year, ByteDance actually acquired a number of patents from Smartisan, while a number of Smartisan employees transferred to ByteDance.
ByteDance is flying high at the moment, it managed to make a name for itself in the business and it obviously looking for places to invest. Smartisan, on the other hand, was always a niche player in China’s smartphone market. The company did have some interesting products to offer, but it never managed to rival the very best out there in terms of sales, not even close to that.
TikTok is ByteDance’s bread and butter, along with Douyin. TikTok was launched back in 2017 for markets outside of China, and it quickly managed to create a huge following. TikTok was one of the most popular applications in the Google Play Store last year, and it has somewhere in between 100 and 500 million downloads at the moment, as the Play Store is not giving out specific information.
If you haven’t heard of Douyin, well, there’s a good reason for that. Douyin is a service limited to China, and it’s basically TikTok for the Chinese market. On top of all that, it is worth noting that ByteDance recently began investing in sectors that are not related to social media, as the company hired some people from JukeDeck, a London-based startup. JukeDeck specializes in AI-generated music, and it may contribute to the company’s smartphone, in addition to a number of other products that ByteDance has planned.
Many companies have decided to try their luck in the smartphone sector, and many of them have failed. Even well-known companies, that have been in the business for a long time, are having problems keeping up pace with the best players out there, so it will be interesting to see what is ByteDance’s plan. The company probably has a clear plan on what to do, as getting into the smartphone market, at this point in time, just for the sake of it is a terrible idea. We still do now know when will ByteDance’s smartphone reach the market, but considering it has been in development for seven months already, we may see it launched before the end of 2019.