ByteDance Moves Employees Overseas at Doubled Salaries

Recent news on the web suggests that since November 2023, TikTok has begun notifying members of its technology and data team in China, including front- and back-end developers, data analytics and algorithms specialists, to move to work abroad. The targeted workplaces cover Singapore, Australia, Canada and the United States.

Since the beginning of 2023, a number of senior executives from ByteDance have been transferred to TikTok's U.S. team. These executives are primarily responsible for TikTok's business in advertising, human resources, business operations, marketing, and e-commerce after the transfer. Some of these executives have also moved their teams in Beijing to the US. According to one TikTok employee, those who accept the overseas positions will enjoy a salary that is roughly double that of their domestic counterparts and receive a two-year rental subsidy. While employees who refuse the transfer will not be forced to be fired at this time, TikTok has seen a significant reduction in related jobs in China.

TikTok, ByteDance's short-video social platform, was launched in May 2017, and is now a phenomenal APP with more than 1 billion active users around the world. its global downloads reached 3.5 billion in 2023, and it successfully surpassed the two overseas social giants of Twitter and Snapchat. Among them, the U.S. market is one of TikTok's main battlefield, and as of March 2023, its U.S. monthly active users reached 150 million. Sources said that TikTok will open small store business in Brazil, Spain, France, Italy, Australia, New Zealand and other sites one after another after the year, opening a new pattern of global e-commerce.

People familiar with the matter said that the move to move the team overseas belongs to the normal operation of TikTok in order to operate in global compliance.

In 2020, TikTok was investigated by the United States, the European Union, Australia and many other places on data security grounds. In August of that year, there were rumors of a sale deal between TikTok and Microsoft, but in the end, TikTok maintained its independent operations in the United States. To cope with the risk, TikTok has been building data centers in Europe and the U.S. one after the other since 2020, and accepting local regulation.

In September 2023, TikTok announced that its first data center in Dublin, Ireland, was now operational and began migrating European user data to the center; in July, TikTok's Norwegian-based data center operator, Green Mountain, a Norwegian-based data center, was approved for operation; and on December 1, 2023, TikTok released a statement that On December 1, 2023, TikTok released a statement announcing that it will invest more than €12 billion in Europe over the next ten years to advance Project Clover, which aims to provide data protection for more than 150 million European users.