ByteDance Appoints Julie Gao To Be New TikTok CFO, Thanks To Success In Musical.ly Acquisition

JAKARTA - TikTok owner ByteDance has appointed company attorney Julie Gao, as its new chief financial officer (CFO). This is known through according to an internal memo sent to staff on Monday, April 26 as seen by Reuters.

According to a memo sent by ByteDance chief executive Liang Rubo, Gao is currently a Hong Kong-based capital market attorney. He works at the law firm Skadden. He plans to be based in Hong Kong and Singapore once he joins ByteDance,

A ByteDance spokesperson also confirmed Gao's appointment. He will be joining ByteDance in May.

Gao had advised on ByteDance's acquisition of Musical.ly, which was later integrated into TikTok, and Shanghai-based game studio Moonton. This is revealed in his biography page on the official website of Skadden.

The move comes after ByteDance's former CFO, Shou Zi Chew, who joined the company in March 2021, stepped down in November 2021 and chose to focus on being TikTok's CEO.

ByteDance said last April that it had no immediate plans for a public listing or offering an IPO. But sources previously told Reuters they were looking at the possibility of listing on the Hong Kong or New York exchanges.

The 10-year-old company saw total revenue grow 70% YoY, to around USD 58 billion (Rp 839.2 trillion) in 2021. According to Reuters, this growth was actually slower than the previous year as China tightened its regulations on big technology companies. .

In 2020, the company's total revenue grew by more than 100% to US$ 34.3 billion (Rp 496.3 trillion).

Now one of the world's largest private technology companies, ByteDance was valued at around $300 billion in trading earlier this year. This amount is much larger than the Indonesian government's budget allocation of IDR 2,714 trillion for government spending, both central and regional, in 2022.