Lotus Invests in ByteDance——the Global AI and Content Powerhouse—— to Drive the Intelligent Era

Lotus Asset Management is pleased to announce our strategic investment in ByteDance — a decision rooted in our deep conviction in the long-term value of "AI-native content ecosystems," and in ByteDance's unrivalled combination of global scale, technological depth, and commercial execution.

From Algorithmic Recommendation to Full-Stack AI: ByteDance's Thirteen-Year Evolution

Founded in 2012, ByteDance built its foundation on the personalised recommendation algorithm behind Toutiao, and over thirteen years has grown into a super-ecosystem spanning content, e-commerce, enterprise collaboration, and artificial intelligence. Its core product portfolio covers virtually every major internet market worldwide: Douyin commands over 700 million daily active users domestically, while TikTok reaches 1.56 billion monthly active users across more than 150 countries. Across all its platforms, ByteDance's total monthly active users have surpassed 4 billion, placing it on par with Meta's family of apps. The enterprise productivity suite Feishu (Lark), the AI large language model Doubao, and the creative tool CapCut together form a three-pronged full-stack architecture of "consumer traffic + productivity tools + AI foundation models."

ByteDance's commercial achievements have already surpassed what most publicly listed tech giants could imagine. In Q1 2025, ByteDance revenue exceeded USD 43 billion for the first time, overtaking Meta's USD 42.3 billion to become the world's highest-grossing social media company; Q2 revenue climbed further to approximately USD 48 billion, up 25% year-on-year, again ahead of Meta's USD 47.5 billion. Full-year 2025 revenue is estimated at approximately USD 186 billion — nearly level with Meta's USD 187 billion — while net profit for the year is expected to approach USD 50 billion, a record high for the company. On the e-commerce side, Douyin's gross merchandise volume surpassed RMB 4 trillion in 2025, with local lifestyle services GMV exceeding RMB 850 billion, a year-on-year increase of 59% — forming the core pillar of ByteDance's next trillion-yuan revenue pool.

AI Frontrunner: Doubao Leads the Market, Capital Accelerates

ByteDance's AI ambitions extend well beyond the application layer, reaching deep into foundation model infrastructure. Doubao is the number one consumer AI application in China by active usage, and ByteDance ranks among the fastest companies globally at scaling AI capabilities into commercialised products. To entrench this advantage, ByteDance plans to deploy RMB 160 billion (approximately USD 23 billion) in AI capital expenditure in 2026, up from RMB 150 billion in 2025, with RMB 85 billion earmarked specifically for advanced AI chip procurement to build a formidable compute moat. Goldman Sachs has noted that ByteDance's AI services have become among the most widely used in China.

Valuation Surge: A Private Market Consensus

Capital markets have consistently re-rated ByteDance's value upward. An employee share buyback programme in autumn 2025 implied a valuation of approximately USD 330 billion; secondary market transactions in November 2025 reflected a USD 480 billion valuation; and in February 2026, General Atlantic's proposed sale of its ByteDance stake implied a record valuation of USD 550 billion — a 66% increase in under six months. This figure surpasses Alibaba, approaches Tencent, and ranks ByteDance among the top three most valuable private companies globally, behind only SpaceX and OpenAI. From its Series B in 2013, ByteDance's valuation has risen more than 9,000-fold in under thirteen years.

ByteDance's ascent validates a new-era thesis: in the converging cycle of AI and content, the combination of large-scale user behavioural data, a self-iterating recommendation engine, and an ever-expanding commercial monetisation frontier creates a moat that is structurally unreplicable. As investors in ByteDance, Lotus Asset Management firmly believes that this still-private global technology titan is at a critical inflection point — transitioning from "content platform" to "AI infrastructure operator" — and that its long-term intrinsic value remains substantially underpriced.