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Headquarters of ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, in September, 2020. Photo: AFP

ByteDance looks to hire 13,000 in effort to supercharge its ed-tech business, Dali

  • Formed last year, ByteDance’s educational tech unit, Dali, will more than double in size over the next four months, according to the company
  • China’s market for online education is expected to surpass US$83 billion by 2022

ByteDance, the Beijing-based owner of Tiktok, plans to supercharge its online education unit with a hiring spree to recruit some 13,000 employees as the company seeks to diversify its revenue streams.

Of the total new employees, ByteDance said it will hire 10,000 professionals already in the workforce within the next four months and more than 3,000 fresh graduates to join after the spring semester, according to a Friday statement by one of the company’s WeChat accounts.

The company is seeking to fill a variety of positions, including teaching, development, product design and marketing across more than 10 cities in China and is expected to double the team of ByteDance‘s “Dali Education”, a subsidiary it formed in October to consolidate all its existing education tech products. At that time, the unit had more than 10,000 employees, according to newspaper Beijing Business Today.

Dali has already launched several online schooling apps and a smart lamp designed to enable parents to make video calls via the device when their children do their school assignments at home.

“In 2021, Dali Education will continue to upgrade user experience, expand, and innovate,” it said on Friday.

ByteDance unveils its new smart lamp, a device under its Dali education business, at a press conference in Beijing on October 29. Louis Yang (at right), the head of Dali’s smart lamp product team, said the device allows parents to help their children with their studies. Photo: Handout

In a statement in December, Dali highlighted some of their achievements, such as its big data technology that helped grade 21 million exam papers in Jiangsu province in 2020. According the company, it also enabled nearly 1,000 middle and primary schools to conduct 3 billion minutes of online classes during the pandemic, for free.

During the Spring Festival, Dali partnered with state media People‘s Daily to offer free classes that people can watch to enrich themselves as they stayed home during the holiday.

ByteDance also promised to “keep investing in education” as it seeks to diversify revenue sources. Its TikTok app was hit by political headwinds in the US and India, major markets for the platform, while its domestic version Douyin achieved 600 million daily active users last August, roughly equivalent to two-thirds of China‘s total number of short video app users, according to figures from the China internet Network Information Centre.

China’s online learning market, which was estimated to have surpassed 315 billion yuan (US$48 million) in 2020, almost tripled from five years ago, according to global market data tracker Statista. The Chinese Academy of Sciences expects the market to surpass 540 billion yuan by 2022.

The rising demand for online education has spurred an investment frenzy, crowning multiple ed-tech unicorns during the Covid-19 pandemic, such as Yuanfudao, a start-up valued US$15.5 billion that is now eyeing an initial public offering, as well as Zuoyebang, valued at more than US$10 billion, according to Reuters.

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