Revenue from Chinese social media giant ByteDance’s short video app leapt up 38% to $6.3 billion last year in Europe even as it faces the threat of being banned in the United States.
For Chinese social media giant ByteDance, 2024 was both a very bad and very good year. In the United States, President Biden signed a law requiring ByteDance to sell its flagship app, TikTok, or see it banned. But outside the U.S., TikTok saw its revenues leap by 38% to $6.3 billion.
TikTok’s operations in the United Kingdom, Europe, and Latin America more than doubled revenues since 2022, when the company brought in $2.6 billion, according to filings submitted to Companies House, the U.K’s corporate registry.
It still isn’t profitable, even though it’s moving in the right direction: In 2024, its pre-tax losses narrowed to $616 million, down from $1.47 billion in 2023. As it’s started inching toward profitability, its growth rate outside of the U.S. has slowed, though it’s still significant at 38%. In 2023, the company increased its revenue by 75%.
The filings only show part of TikTok’s global earnings, and an even smaller slice of the financials for its parent ByteDance, which also operates the Chinese version of the app Douyin, the Chinese flagship news app Jinri Toutiao (“Today’s Headlines”), and a range of popular AI apps and tools like study aid Gauth and photo sharing app Lemon8. The Information reported that last year that ByteDance revenues grew 29% to $155 billion, putting it within spitting distance of Meta’s $164.5 billion in sales.
Despite that boom, TikTok is facing a barrage of lawsuits and investigations from regulators around the world. In the United States, President Trump appears poised to grant ByteDance a fourth, legally dubious, temporary reprieve from a ban on TikTok. In Europe, however, TikTok reserved $1 billion last year to cover future fines from European governments — and from the rate at which those governments are now coming for TikTok, it now looks like a prescient decision.
Late last year, the European Commission opened proceedings against TikTok for allegedly failing to mitigate election integrity risks by allowing, for instance, fake accounts on the platform to influence the outcome of the 2024 Romanian presidential election. (In part due to manipulation on TikTok, the country took the unprecedented step of annulling the election last November.) U.K. regulators are probing whether the company misused children’s data, Spanish authorities are investigating whether it engaged in illegal ad targeting and the French parliament is examining whether the app is harmful to children’s psychology. The Irish data protection authority — which ordered the company to pay more than half of its $1 billion allotment in fines back in April — has begun a second investigation into whether ByteDance facilitated improper Chinese access to European users’ TikTok data.
Through its “Project Clover” initiative, TikTok has taken steps in recent years to reduce Chinese access to European user data. The company launched a data center in Norway earlier this year, and announced plans to follow it with a second data center in Finland. Those efforts might mitigate the risk of some fines and penalties, but the company could also face a fine of up to 6% of its annual revenue for failures to comply with the European Digital Services Act’s requirement to publicly report information about its advertisers.
Still, TikTok seems to be addressing the financial implications of its regulatory threats by doubling down on cost-cutting. The Financial Times reported on Friday that the company had warned hundreds of its trust and safety in London that it was planning layoffs, with plans to use artificial intelligence to automate moderation work. “The safety of our users continues to be central to the Group’s operations,” TikTok said in its financial accounts.
Its annual filings show that headcount at TikTok’s European operations had fallen 6% over the last year down to 7,981. But despite the cuts, its staff costs grew to $937 million in 2024 from $805 million the previous year. The layoffs are part of a larger effort by TikTok to reduce costs: the company also cut workers in April, May, and July.
