Profile Of Zhang Yiming, TikTok Owner Who Is One Of The Richest People In The World

Zhang Yiming (Vulcanpost)

YOGYAKARTA – Zhang Yiming's profile continues to receive attention from the world community, especially when he was named the 61st richest person by Forbes. The wealth owned by Zhang Yiming reaches 16.2 billion US dollars or approximately IDR 243 trillion. Despite his wealth, who exactly is he?

Zhang Yiming's profile

Zhang is the owner of ByteDance, the parent company of the app TikTok. Zhang was born on April 1, 1983, to parents who work as civil servants in Fujian province, China. During his life, he was known as a person who likes to do business. On the other hand, he is also interested in the world of digital technology.

Zhang himself is an alumnus of Nankai University who graduated in 2005. The study program he initially took was microelectronics. After that he put his interest in another field, namely majoring in software engineering.

After graduating from education, Zhang is said to have entered an online travel company, namely kuxun.com. At the company, he worked as an ordinary engineer. His career rose in the second year to supervise 40 to 50 workers working on back-end technology.

At the company, Zhang learned a lot, especially related to marketing. These skills also helped him thrive in his later business endeavors, including his time at ByteDance.

Several sources also said that Zhang Yiming had founded a property site called 99fang in 2009. However, he decided to stop after three years of running. He decided to build a new business in 2012 by founding ByteDance.

Initially, ByteDance was known as an internet technology company. The company also provides a news aggregation service called Tayatato. The Tautiato service has succeeded in gaining profits as it made it the most popular media in China in 2016.

In the same year, in September 2016 to be precise, TikTok was finally founded. Initially, TikTok was known as a video-sharing application. In China, the application is called Douyin. TikTok's success doesn't come instantly. At that time, Zhang required all of his employees to download and have a TikTok account.

He even asked his workers to get a certain number of likes. If they do not meet the results, they will be punished with push-ups. This decision then led him to great success.

TikTok's success has accelerated after ByteDance bought and acquired Musical.ly, a Chinese social media service with headquarters in Shanghai but having offices in Santa Monica, United States of America. Musical.ly is considered the forerunner of TikTok because originally the social media was used by its users to easily create and share short lip-sync videos with other users.

The success that Zhang harvested from TikTok was increasingly unstoppable, leading him to sit in second place in China as the richest person. It doesn't stop there, ByteDance now has a valuation of 75 billion United States dollars. The company is also the most valuable private company in the world. Meanwhile, in the first quarter of 2020, ByteDance made a profit of US$5.6 billion or approximately Rp.79 trillion.

ByteDance itself has several products in the form of social media applications that are widely used in China, such as FlipChat which is similar to WeChat. Apart from that, there is also Duoshan, a short message application in video format.

That's Zhang Yiming's profile. Visit VOI.ID for other interesting information.