ByteDance heads first SCMP Plus Going Global 100 ranking. Further Reading Discover MORE stories on Before you go Published: 11:02am, 8 Oct 2026 TikTok owner ByteDance is China's Going Global champion, according to a new SCMP Plus databank tracking mainland companies' overseas expansion efforts. The social media giant topped the debut SCMP Plus Going Global 100 ranking ahead of Apple assembler Foxconn Industrial Internet, online fashion retailer Shein and electric vehicle (EV) maker BYD. More than 2,000 companies were assessed as part of the research project, which assigned each contender a weighted score based on overseas revenue, reliance on foreign markets and the pace of overseas growth. About two-thirds of the Going Global 100 members are technology or consumer companies, such as carmakers, reflecting how private businesses are driving China's overseas growth through the development of cutting-edge technology and the creation of their own global brands. Private manufacturers are also now outpacing state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in overseas expansion, as they move beyond being assemblers for multinational brands and look to escape cutthroat price wars at home. "Private firms have started to dominate, given the growing prominence of consumer electronics, e-commerce platforms, digital tech, EVs and green tech and even light manufacturing," said Jayant Menon, senior fellow at the ISEAS - Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore. The Going Global 100 database is exclusively available to subscribers of SCMP Plus, the premium data and news offering from the South China Morning Post. ByteDance boosted overseas sales by nearly 50 per cent last year, according to Chinese media reports. The company generated more than 30 per cent of its revenue from overseas markets, up from 25 per cent a year earlier. Its rapid growth was driven by e-commerce business TikTok Shop, which recorded a 70 per cent surge in gross merchandise value. The company, founded by Zhang Yiming - Asia's richest man, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index - has also reached US$4 billion of annualised artificial intelligence revenue, the highest reported figure among Chinese businesses. AI investment weighed on profit last year. Still, the company is building data centres in countries including Thailand and Brazil to support international expansion. The prominence of private technology companies marks a sharp shift from the early years of the Belt and Road Initiative, which was launched in 2013 to build overseas infrastructure and strengthen trade links. SOEs then dominated China's overseas expansion, sending engineers, builders and financiers abroad to work on megaprojects. "In the past, it was heavy industry and infrastructure, which are already nationalised in China," said Charles Chang, finance professor at Fudan University in Shanghai. In 2023, China shifted the focus of the Belt and Road Initiative to smaller, more remunerative projects after parts of the programme became saddled with debt and faced opposition in some countries. Now, private Chinese companies are striving to build globally recognised brands as part of an official "going global" strategy, moving beyond their traditional role as low-cost assemblers (see SCMP Plus fact sheet). Domestic overcapacity and profit-sapping price wars are also prompting businesses to look overseas for growth. China's own market is beset by a years-long property slump, weak consumption and employment jitters. The shift towards offshore markets helped boost China's outbound direct investment by 11.1 per cent last year to a record US$214 billion, according to an annual report jointly issued by the Ministry of Commerce and two other state economic bodies in September. That made China the world's second-largest source of global capital, trailing only the United States. Outbound investment has picked up since 2021, when China introduced new policies to support overseas e-commerce expansion. Before that, an investment boom came to a crashing halt in 2017, when the government tightened foreign-exchange controls. Technology-related industries were among the fastest-growing destinations for China's overseas investment last year. Spending on information transmission, software and information technology services surged by 88.3 per cent to US$13.1 billion. Chinese tech companies are also leading a shift towards developing and selling new products worldwide. They thrive in online entertainment, AI, e-commerce and autonomous driving (see SCMP Plus fact sheet). Among the more visible brands offshore are AI platform DeepSeek, drone maker DJI and video-game development company miHoYo. Chinese carmakers have also come to dominate the global EV market, helped by competitive pricing and technological advances, including batteries. BYD, Geely and SAIC Motor are among leaders of the overseas push amid domestic price wars and rising global demand for cars that are environmentally friendly (see SCMP Plus fact sheet). The Going Global 100 members have expanded across the world, with 88 having a presence elsewhere in Asia, 78 in North America and 71 in Europe. Southeast Asia is a major investment destination because of geographical proximity, local manufacturing expertise and free-trade agreements. BYD, for instance, opened a US$490 million EV factory in Thailand in 2024. Southeast Asia offered Chinese firms a nearshoring haven in countries whose exports were subject to lower US tariffs than exports from China itself, said Menon of the ISEAS - Yusof Ishak Institute. Wages remained lower on average than in China, he added. While SOEs had pulled back on aggressive projects abroad to cut risk, Menon said China was now working with private firms intent on going global. Government funds offered financing, for example, while infrastructure-building consortiums overseas led by SOEs could subcontract to private tech and manufacturing firms. Fudan University's Chang said some SOEs had invested in private firms to capture a share of overseas-growth dividends at a time of domestic market saturation, particularly in sectors where China was strong, such as robotics and consumer electronics. Ralph Jennings joined the Political Economy desk as a Senior Reporter in August 2022 having worked as a freelancer since 2011. Ralph previously covered news for Thomson Reuters in Taipei and for local newspapers in California. He graduated from University of California, Berkeley with a bachelor's degree in mass communication. related topics

ByteDance's Doubao app lands on Huawei HarmonyOS PCs with Doubao-Seed-2.1 Pro and Turbo. Published: October 7, 2026 Want to read in a language you're more familiar with? Doubao's native HarmonyOS PC app ships with Doubao-Seed-2.1 Pro and Turbo, chat and work modes and agent-style tools; Huawei says it topped the HarmonyOS PC wishlist. ByteDance's AI assistant Doubao is now available as a native app on Huawei's HarmonyOS PCs. Chinese tech outlets first reported the desktop client's arrival on October 1, and IT Home confirmed on October 7 that users can download it directly by searching for Doubao in the HarmonyOS app store. Huawei said Doubao ranked first on the HarmonyOS PC user wishlist, the list of apps owners of its HarmonyOS computers most want to see on the platform. The first version ships with two models, Doubao-Seed-2.1 Pro and Doubao-Seed-2.1 Turbo. ByteDance released the Seed 2.1 series on Volcengine in June, positioning Pro for exploring highly complex tasks and Turbo for large-scale production use. Compared with the previous generation, the company says Seed 2.1 improves coding delivery, long-chain agent task execution and multimodal understanding. The app is built around two modes that users can switch between freely: Chat and Work. In Work mode, users set a goal and attach files, images or material from their Doubao cloud drive, then choose Auto, Turbo or Pro and pick a reasoning intensity. They can also create projects, add local folders and set scheduled tasks. A side workbench supports new tabs, so a user can browse the web, read reference material and talk to Doubao at the same time while several tasks run in parallel. For content creation, the launch version includes deep research, PowerPoint generation, a writing assistant, image generation and cloud storage. Video generation, AI blogging, recording transcription, music generation and AI spreadsheets are also available. ByteDance pitches the client at office work, academic research, file management, automated tasks and creative design. HarmonyOS PCs run Huawei's own operating system rather than Windows, which means every mainstream application has to be rebuilt natively before users can install it. A general-purpose AI assistant has been one of the most visible gaps, and Doubao's arrival gives Huawei's laptop owners access to one of China's most widely used chatbots without relying on a browser. For ByteDance, the release extends Doubao's desktop presence beyond Windows and Mac, where the company has steadily turned its PC client into an agent that can operate software, run multi-step tasks and work across local and cloud files.

YouTubers' data scraping suit against ByteDance lives on. The plaintiffs claim ByteDance bypassed YouTube's protections when accessing their videos, cheating them out of advertising revenue. SAN FRANCISCO (CN) - A federal judge ruled Friday YouTubers have standing in a suit accusing tech giant ByteDance of data mining their videos to train artificial intelligence models U.S. District Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley ruled that Ted Entertainment and Matt Fisher properly claimed at this stage that they've suffered what she called a pocketbook injury. Ted Entertainment, a company, and Fisher, an individual, create and post original content to YouTube and claim a large reason they chose the site was because of its protective measures, like forbidding people from data mining. "As one court already ruled in a similar suit brought by plaintiffs, '[a]s alleged, the barriers exist and require users to satisfy certain conditions before obtaining access," Corley, a Joe Biden appointee wrote. "Those barriers may be modest, perhaps by design given YouTube's business model, but they are barriers nonetheless. At the pleadings stage, plaintiffs' allegations are sufficient.'" The plaintiffs argued that ByteDance bypassed YouTube's protections, meaning their content didn't receive views that would have generated advertising revenue. ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, is building several AI projects, which they want to turn language prompts into audiovisual content. To achieve that goal, the AI needs large amounts of data as training material - data that comes from the plaintiffs' work, they say. The plaintiffs claimed ByteDance violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which enables a private right of action for someone who's been injured. However, ByteDance argued the plaintiffs had no injury, and therefore no standing. The supposed injury is the copying of materials used to train AI, not the circumvention of YouTube's security measures. The plaintiffs didn't properly claim an injury linked to that circumvention, ByteDance argued. Corley noted the plaintiffs made a handful of claims, including that the circumvention led to lost advertising revenue and lost YouTube Premium revenue. "Drawing inferences in plaintiffs' favor, plaintiffs 'lost per-view advertising revenue that YouTube's monetization system would otherwise have generated,'" the judge wrote, adding: "So, plaintiffs plausibly allege their pocketbook injury is directly traceable to defendant's circumvention sufficient to support standing." ByteDance cited what Corley called inapplicable cases in its defense which involved no monetary harm and had no focus on the link between the injury and statutory violation, leading to her decision in favor of the plaintiffs. Pivoting to the question of statutory standing, Corley wrote that plaintiffs under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act must fit within a group Congress has allowed to sue. ByteDance said the plaintiffs didn't meet that definition. That's because the private right of action is linked to the owner of the circumvented measure, not anyone who puts content on a platform like YouTube with its own controls. However, Corley wrote that the statute states "any person injured by a violation," as well as owners of protected material, fall within that group. The judge again found ByteDance's cited cases unpersuasive. "These cases thus reaffirm, rather than undermine, that copyright owners such as plaintiffs are at the very heart of the 'zone of interests' Congress sought to protect." Corley added. Attorneys on either side of the case couldn't immediately be reached for comment. Its weekly newsletter Closing Arguments offers the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world, while the monthly Under the Lights dishes the legal dirt from Hollywood, sports, Big Tech and the arts.