Member Info for jpsherwin

Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) says it is committed to try to buy TikTok's U.S. operations, after CEO Satya Nadella discussed a potential deal during a phone call today with Pres. Trump.

Following the conversation, the company issued a blog post saying it would move quickly to pursue discussions with TikTok parent ByteDance (BDNCE), aiming to complete negotiations by Sept. 15.

"Microsoft fully appreciates the importance of addressing the President’s concerns," the company said. "It is committed to acquiring TikTok subject to a complete security review and providing proper economic benefits to the United States, including the United States Treasury."

Microsoft said TikTok operations under its ownership would build on the popular user experience while adding privacy and security protections.

The proposed transaction has gained the blessing of top Trump administration officials, including Treasury Secretary Mnuchin, as well as several Republican lawmakers, after the president's Friday night comments that he preferred a TikTok ban in the U.S. instead of a sale took all sides by surprise.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/03/microsoft-confirms-talks-to-buy-tiktok-in-us.html

Bytedance has tiktok amongst others, valuation of said investment?

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8586393/Microsoft-says-prepared-explore-purchase-TikTok-CEO-spoke-Trump.html

Tomorrow will certainly be interesting. Lots of media speculation, “will they or won’t they”?

Irrespective, if folk pick up on it , this has real potential to make people money.

That being said and I must reiterate, DYOR

This is high risk!!!!

List of Overseas Products
• Vigo Video/Hypster/Flipagram: Merged with TikTok.
• TopBuzz
• News Republic
• Lark: Productivity tools like G Suite.
• Helo: Micro-blogging for India.
• BaBe: News-feed for Indonesia.
• Resso: Streaming services for Southeast Asia.
• Peoople: Social recommendation by friends and KOLs.
• Sharee: Interest-feed for Japanese market.

ByteDance Ltd.
Type - Privately held company
Industry - Internet
Founded - March 2012; 8 years ago
Founder - Bashar AlHrbat
Headquarters -Haidian District, Beijing, China
Area served - Worldwide
Key people –
Zhang Yiming, Chairman & CEO
Kevin A. Mayer, COO
Lidong Zhang, Chairman of ByteDance China
Nan Zhang, CEO of ByteDance China

Products
Toutiao
TikTok / Douyin
BuzzVideo
Vigo Video
Helo

Revenue - Increase CN¥140 billion (US$20 billion, 2019)
https://www.bytedance.com/en/

Toutiao
The first version of Toutiao was launched in August 2012, five months after Zhang founded ByteDance. Toutiao hit 1 million daily active users four months after its launch.
In January 2014, the company created the "Toutiaohao" (???) platform to attract more PGC (professionally generated content) and UGC (user generated content) creators; and later in the year, added video capabilities. Toutiao used interest-based and decentralized distribution to help long-tail content creators find an audience. An often cited example is "Zhuguan Baba" (????), a young pig farmer in Northern China whose posts on how to raise pigs attracted millions of readers on Toutiao.
In February 2016, a missing person alerts project was started on the Toutiao platform. As of June 2020, the alerts have helped find 13,116 missing persons.
In August 2019, Bytedance launches Toutiao Search as a part of its Toutiao portal – a news aggregator.
Other products
In August 2015, ByteDance launched TopBuzz, a content platform for videos, articles, breaking news and GIFs in the U.S. and later in Brazil in 2016. ByteDance launched PGC short video platform TopBuzz Video in Japan in September 2016. In October 2016, ByteDance invested in India's largest vernacular content aggregation platform Dailyhunt. In December 2016, ByteDance invested in the Indonesian news recommendation platform BABE.
In February 2017, ByteDance acquired Flipagram. In July 2017, ByteDance launched their UGC short video platform Hypstar (Vigo Video) in Southeast Asia. In November 2017, ByteDance acquired global news app News Republic and global lip-sync video community musical.ly. In November 2019, it was reported that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States had opened an investigation into ByteDance regarding its acquisition of musical.ly on national security grounds after it dissipated from TikTok on August 2, 2018. The app now takes on the TikTok name.
In November 2017, ByteDance acquired News Republic from Cheetah Mobile. ByteDance also started Gogokid in 2018, an online English learning platform for children that provides one-on-one classes with native English speakers.
In December 2019, ByteDance began a test release of its music streaming app Resso in India and Indonesia. On March 4, 2020, the company officially launched the app, which it described as a "social music streaming app". Resso allows users to highlight and share lyrics, comments and other user-generated content with each other alongside streaming of full-length tracks. Resso says that it has licensing agreements in place with Warner Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Merlin and Beggars Group, among others.
In April 2020, the Cyberspace Administration of China ordered ByteDance to take down its office collaboration tool called Feishu because it could be used to circumvent internet censorship

All research is sourced from the net.

ByteDance Ltd. is a Chinese multinational internet technology company headquartered in Beijing.It was founded by Zhang Yiming in 2012. ByteDance is reportedly worth over US$100 billion as of May 2020.
ByteDance's core product, Toutiao ("Headlines"), is a content platform in China and around the world. Toutiao started out as a news recommendation engine and gradually evolved into a platform delivering content in various formats, such as texts, images, question-and-answer posts, microblogs, and videos.
ByteDance is the developer of the video-sharing social networking service Douyin (TikTok). On November 9, 2017, ByteDance acquired social media start-up Musical.ly for up to US$1 billion. They combined it with TikTok on August 2, 2018 into a single global application, keeping the TikTok name.
As of November 2018, ByteDance had over 800 million daily active users (over 1 billion accumulated users) across all of its content platforms. The company was valued at $78 billion and is considered one of the most valuable unicorns in the world. The company has an internal committee of the Chinese Communist Party as well as strategic partnerships with Chinese Communist Party-supported ventures in Beijing and Shanghai. ByteDance is backed by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, SoftBank Group, Sequoia Capital, General Atlantic, and Hillhouse Capital Group. It has garnered public attention over allegations that it worked with the Chinese Communist Party to censor and surveil content pertaining to Xinjiang re-education camps and other topics the Party deemed controversial.
On 19 May 2020, ByteDance and Disney released an announcement that Kevin Mayer, head of Disney's streaming business, would join ByteDance. Since 1 June 2020, Mayer has been serving as the CEO of TikTok and the COO of ByteDance, reporting directly to the company CEO Zhang Yiming.

Products
Neihan Duanzi
In March 2012, ByteDance launched its first app called Neihan Duanzi (????). This app allowed users to circulate jokes, memes, and humorous videos. At its peak, Neihan Duanzi had over 200 million users in 2017.
On 10 April 2018, ByteDance permanently sunsetted Neihan Duanzi, as the National Radio and Television Administration accused Neihan Duanzi of hosting "vulgar" and "improper" content and "triggering strong sentiments of resentment among internet users". In response to Neihan Duanzi's shutdown, founder Zhang Yiming issued a letter stating that the app was "incommensurate with socialist core values" and promised that ByteDance would "further deepen cooperation" with the authorities to promote their policies. Following the shutdown, ByteDance announced that it would give preference to Chinese Communist Party members in its hiring and increase its censors from 6,000 to 10,000 employees.

TikTok hits back as Trump threatens to ban app in US http://news.sky.com/story/tiktok-hits-back-as-trump-threatens-to-ban-app-in-us-12040588

For me it was worth the small investment, it may come to nothing, it may come to something.

The information below was from the latest report, 5 min purview and it's there, I will research more throughout the weekend, if others have more please share it with me.

Many thanks

ByteDance through the Homaer Fund - During the year under review, the Group invested US$1 million in the Homaer Fund, the sole investment of which is an equity interest in ByteDance. Headquartered in Beijing, China, ByteDance is a technology group operating machine learning-enabled content platforms across cultures and geographies. It has a portfolio of mobile applications that is available in over 150 markets and 75 languages and that includes Toutiao, Helo, TikTok, Douyin, News Republic, Vigo Video, Huoshan, Xigua Video, TopBuzz, BuzzVideo and FaceU. Launched in 2016, Douyin, a video-sharing social platform, is generally regarded as the most popular mobile applications of ByteDance and has an international version known as TikTok. Downloaded 738 million times in 2019 raising the total number of downloads to over 1.5 billion, TikTok was the seventh-most downloaded mobile applications of the 2010s. As of July 2019, Bytedance had daily active users exceeding 700 million and monthly active users of more than 1.5 billion around the world.

Agrios Global Holdings Ltd. ("Agrios") - Agrios, an investee company of the Group listed on the Canadian Securities Exchange, is the holding company of a data analytics driven agriculture technology and service group that owns, leases and manages properties and equipment for eco-sustainable agronomy and provides advisory services for aeroponic cultivation to the cannabis industry. During the year under review, the Agrois group generated under various contracts with a client in the Washington State of the U.S. quarterly rental, product and service fees of between US$708,000 and US$1.5 million. However, as the majority of such revenue had not been collected and was carried under accounts receivable, the cash resources of the Agrios group had been adversely affected. To fund the short term needs of its operations, the Agrios group raised, through the issue of a number of unsecured convertible debentures with a conversion price of between C$0.37 and C$0.50 per share, a total of US$3.2 million (including two drawdowns totalling US$1.5 million under a convertible credit facility of US$5.5 million). Furthermore, in order to cut down operating expenses, the Agrios group had taken steps to reduce its administrative employee levels and its outside consulting commitments. Meanwhile, the 65%-owned joint venture of the Agrios group, Yunnan Hua Ma Biological Development Co. Ltd., successfully obtained an industrial hemp cultivation permit, an import and export permit and a food trading permit in the Yunnan Province in China.

Trading in the shares of Ayondo has been suspended since February 2019. In view of the conversion price of the Convertible Notes, however, further downward adjustment to the fair value of the Group's investment in Ayondo was made as at 31 December 2019.

ayondo Ltd ("Ayondo") - Ayondo, an investee company of the Group listed on the Catalist of the Singapore Exchange, is the holding company of a financial technology group that focused on social trading activity. The financial performance of the Ayondo group in 2018 and 2019 was negatively impacted due to changes relating to product intervention imposed by European and UK regulators, including in particular the limiting of leverages for contracts-for-difference which was the core product of the Ayondo group. Under the financial difficulty and stress that ensued, the Ayondo group proceeded with a restructuring of its business. During the year under review, the Ayondo group disposed of ayondo Markets Ltd., a key operating subsidiary, and filed for the insolvency of ayondo GmBH, another key operating subsidiary. In the absence of continued contributions from these subsidiaries, the Ayondo group had minimal operating activities. Meanwhile, as part of its restructuring initiatives and with the intention to shift its focus to Asia, the Ayondo group entered into and subsequently secured shareholder approval for a number of conditional agreements involving the issue of three separate convertible notes (the "Convertible Notes") totalling S$9.9 million with a conversion price of S$0.007 per share to Golden Nugget Jinzhuan Limited ("GN") and a GN shareholder. GN operates a social investing platform, iMaibo.net, for Asian, European and other global contracts-for-difference to facilitate investment-related business, via its network of social media influencers, key opinion leaders and their followers, and third party service and product providers. Since its inception in 2013, GN's platform has built a user base with over 3.5 million registered users.

Velocity Mobile Limited ("Velocity"), an unlisted investee company of the Group, is the holding company of a technology group that provides real-time lifestyle mobile applications for premium consumers focusing on the areas of dining, travel, experiences and luxury goods. As reflected by the increase in revenue generated per employee during the year under review, the Velocity group continued to achieve productivity gains thanks to the efficacy and efficiency of its proprietary technology. There was also strong growth in gross profit margin, largely driven by the rising contribution from Velocity for Business, a white-label product designed for enterprise customers which was launched in the third quarter of 2018, as well as improved working capital terms with key suppliers. As a result, the financial performance of the Velocity group continued to show encouraging progress. In December 2019, the Velocity group secured another round of fundraising through the issue of an unsecured convertible loan note.

The Company is a closed-ended investment company with a premium listing under Chapter 15 of the Listing Rules of the Financial Conduct Authority in the UK. In accordance with the Company's investment policy, a copy of which is set out on page 74, the investment strategy of the Group focuses on investing in small to medium sized trading companies based mainly in the Greater China and South East Asian region with a view to building a diversified portfolio of minority investments in such companies. The investment objective of the Company is to achieve attractive investment returns through capital appreciation on a medium to long term horizon. To spread the investment risk of the Group, none of the Group's investments at the time when made exceeded 20% of its gross assets.

I would argue it's not that significant, subjective of course.

ByteDance is a technology group operating machine learning-enabled content platforms across cultures and geographies. It has a portfolio of mobile applications that is available in over 150 markets and 75 languages and that includes Toutiao, Helo, TikTok, Douyin, News Republic, Vigo Video, Huoshan, Xigua Video, TopBuzz, BuzzVideo and FaceU. Launched in 2016, Douyin, a video-sharing social platform, is generally regarded as the most popular mobile applications of ByteDance and has an international version known as TikTok. Downloaded 738 million times in 2019 raising the total number of downloads to over 1.5 billion, TikTok was the seventh-most downloaded mobile applications of the 2010s. As of July 2019, Bytedance had daily active users exceeding 700 million and monthly active users of more than 1.5 billion around the world.

Nothing to apologize for, does it make it less valuable? I doubt it, globally who does it reach, everyone, every day and everywhere.

There is always a workaround, what people want, people will get. This is a numbers game, irrespective of what DT does, there are millions if not potentially billions of users globally that can use this.

now I'm not saying buy or sell, what I am saying is do the research and if you think it's a viable buy then invest, if not don't.

Massively high risk but agreed if it’s out there people will cotton on to the investment by WSL into Bytedance.

From what I’ve researched I’ve taken a small position and only wish like most I’m sure I had done it at a lower price.

DYOR

Bobby,

Scroll down or read the last update (RNS) it’s all there, $1 million invest into Bytedance through a fund .