ByteDance, The Company Behind TikTok, Confirmed That It Would Make Smartphones

TikTok has been taking the world by storm but ByteDance, the Chinese startup behind it, has no intention to stop expanding to other fields. This week, after months of rumors, the company has officially confirmed that it would launch its own smartphone line.

According to ByteDance’s spokeswoman, a smartphone had long been part of Smartisan’s plans, even before the deal it made with her company. She also added that the phone would follow Smartisan’s initial scheme to meet the need of the company’s user base.

Yesterday, a sub-division of Caijing, a financial news outlet in China, reported that the smartphone had been developing for seven months. The head of the project is Wu Dezhou, who used to be an executive at Smartisan.

The confirmation of a new smartphone comes out after ByteDance acquired a number of patents from Smartisan. Along with the patents, some of the staff from Smartisan also joined ByteDance, which the company explained as a flow of talent.

Smartisan is a multinational company based in Shanghai and Chengdu. What it does is to market and design consumer electronics goods.

In China, ByteDance is developing fast and will soon become a formidable rival of Tencent and Baidu when it comes to the level of influence. However, its development in countries like India is not without issues. A few months ago, TikTok was temporarily banned due to concern over children's safety on the platform.

According to Zhi Ying, ByteDance’s marketing manager, Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, has over 300 million monthly users in the country; while TikTok itself is becoming more and more popular in North America and India.

Recently, the company started investing in fields that do not directly relate to social media. Several employees of JukeDeck, a London-based startup in AI-generated music have come to work for it, as reported earlier this month.