• by Karlene Lukovitz  @KLmarketdaily, June 18, 2021

While threats of being banned by the former U.S. president certainly caused a period of major uncertainty about the fate of TikTok (and WeChat) last year, it didn't stop the social video platform's parent, China's ByteDance, from enjoying blowout revenue and profit growth.

ByteDance saw its total revenues leap by 111%, to $34.3 billion, and its gross annual profit jump 93%, to $19 billion, according to information circulated in an internal meeting and a memo sent to staff by management of the privately owned company.  

While ByteDance's had a 2020 operating loss of $2.1 billion, versus an operating profit of $684 million in 2019, the loss was mainly due to the cost of share-based compensation for shareholders, according to a CNBC source who attended the meeting.

The memo also claims that ByteDance had 1.9 billion monthly active users across all of its platforms as of the end of 2020, according to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the numbers from the memo. That includes TikTok, the Chinese version of TikTok (called Douyin), and the news aggregation app Toutiao, among others.

Earlier this month, President Joe Biden rescinded the much-appealed Trump executive order that sought to ban TikTok and WeChat in the U.S. 

ByteDance for a time last year sought to sell the U.S. part of its TikTok business to Oracle and Walmart to avoid the ban, but aborted that deal early this year, when Biden was elected. 

One report put ByteDance's valuation at $140 billion as of early 2020.