2020年经济学人 字节跳动引美国关注(1)（在线收听）

Business

商业

ByteDance

字节跳动

Unabashed

勇敢无畏

China’s first global software company is going from strength to strength. America doesn’t like it one bit

中国第一家全球软件公司正在变得越来越强大。美国对此极不欢喜

As covid-19 has forced the world’s teenagers out of school and into their rooms, they have turned to a familiar digital companion, TikTok. The short-video app was downloaded 115m times in March. Its nearly 1bn regular users enjoy silly clips of dog antics alongside pandemic advice from the World Health Organisation. Collectively, TikTok videos tagged with #coronavirus have been watched 53bn times.

covid-19迫使世界各地的青少年离开学校，被困家中，于是他们将注意力转向了一个熟悉的数字伙伴——TikTok。今年3月，这款短视频应用的下载量达到了1.15亿次。该应用有近10亿的老用户喜欢看狗狗滑稽的搞笑视频，同时也能看到世界卫生组织提供的疫情防护建议。带有冠状病毒标签的TikTok视频总观看量高达530亿次。

TikTok’s popularity over the past two years has shone the spotlight on ByteDance, its Beijing-based developer. Founded by a Chinese computer scientist, Zhang Yiming, in 2011, it is now the world’s biggest unlisted technology “unicorn”, recently valued at between $90bn and $100bn. It is also the only technology firm bar Apple with more than 100m users in both China and America, where TikTok has taken on the likes of YouTube and Instagram.

在过去两年中，TikTok的受欢迎程度让位于北京的开发商字节跳动(ByteDance)备受关注。该公司由中国计算机科学家张一鸣于2011年创立，目前是全球最大的未上市的科技“独角兽”，最近估值在900亿至1000亿美元之间。它也是除苹果之外唯一一家在中国和美国都拥有超过1亿用户的科技公司，TikTok已经在YouTube和Instagram等网站上占据了一席之地。

And ByteDance isn’t done. The 60,000 people in its buzzy offices—“We are like flies,” says one former employee—crank out one app after another. In the past year it has launched a worldwide corporate-software service (Lark), a music-streaming app in India and Indonesia (Resso) and, in China, a messaging rival to WeChat. As other firms sack workers amid covid-19, ByteDance is hiring 10,000 globally. It plans to employ 30,000 on top of that this year. ByteDance is not the first Chinese firm with foreign ambitions.

字节跳动并没有止步于此。在其喧闹的办公室里的6万人——“我们就像苍蝇一样，”一位前员工说——还在一个接一个地开发应用程序。在过去一年里，它推出了一个全球范围内的企业软件服务(Lark)，一个印度和印度尼西亚的音乐流媒体应用(Resso)，还在中国推出了一款与微信竞争的通讯软件。面对covid-19，其他公司都在解雇员工，字节跳动却在全球雇佣了1万名员工。该公司计划今年再新雇3万名员工。字节跳动并不是第一家有海外野心的中国公司。

Commodity giants such as CNOOC, an oil firm, have been buying foreign reserves, and rivals, since the 1990s. In the past decade industrial giants have pursued Western competitors from carmaking (as with Geely’s purchase of Volvo) to chemicals (ChemChina’s of Syngenta). More haphazardly, conglomerates like Fosun and Anbang splurged on trophy assets (including Club Med and the Waldorf Astoria hotel, respectively).

自上世纪90年代以来，像中海油这样的大宗商品巨头一直在购买外汇储备和竞争对手。在过去的十年中，从汽车制造(如吉利收购沃尔沃)到化工(中国化工收购先正达)，工业巨头一直在追赶西方竞争对手。更随意的是，复星(Fosun)和安邦(Anbang)等企业集团在战利品资产上大肆炫耀(分别包括地中海俱乐部和华尔道夫酒店)。