Zhang Yiming will step down as CEO of ByteDance

ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming will leave TikTok as the CEO of the popular video application team in his recent retirement from a Chinese technology leader, while Beijing dominates the industry.

Zhang, 38, founded ByteDance almost a decade ago, which led the Beijing-based team to create many highly successful applications including the Chinese platform TikTok and sister Douyin. He ran the company for a while US-China tensions.

ByteDance has said that Zhang will step down at the end of the year, and that Liang Rubo will be one of the founders and founders of human resources.

The transition comes as a business examines the initial public offering, the shares are recently trading on the private market at a valuation of more than $ 200 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.

“Since the beginning of this year, I have spent a lot of time thinking about how to better drive real long-term progress, as it cannot be based on steady but incremental progress,” Zhang wrote in a company blog.

Zhang said he would stay in the company all the time, but would work on “long-term initiatives” and “help drive innovation by leveraging the strengths of highly focused learning.”

“I lack some skills that make me a perfect director,” Zhang wrote. “I’m more interested in studying organizational and market principles,” he added, adding that he was “not very social” and preferred solitary activities like “being online, reading, listening to music, and dreaming”.

His resignation also came as he was suffering from the Chinese technology industry regulatory attack, and followed other notable outputs from major technology companies.

Colin Huang, founder of Pinduoduo, he left the e-commerce team in March, while the Meituan food distribution team is also facing off antitrust probing.

Chinese regulators in November It disrupted the initial public offering of $ 37 billion of the fintech Ant Group, which would have the highest stock market price ever.

Ant was an e-commerce subsidiary of Alibaba a record $ 2.8 million fine last month after regulators abused market dominance.

Jack Ma, the founder of both companies, is it has hardly been seen in public in a speech in Shanghai at the end of last year since he criticized Chinese regulators and state-owned banks.

Additional report by Nian Liu in Beijing