Chinese start-up Kuaishou is bracing for a “tough battle” as it looks to counter the meteoric rise of rival ByteDance and attract more users and profits in the country’s rapidly expanding short video market.
The Tencent-backed company dominated China’s wildly popular short video market from 2016 until the middle of last year, racking up some 200m active users with its simple short-video app that was designed to appeal to less tech-savvy users.
The Chinese government estimated in May that the total value of the sector would reach Rmb30bn ($4.4bn) by the end of this year, up from Rmb11bn in 2018. In the next five years, online streaming demand is expected to grow 14 times over, with 70 per cent of smartphone traffic comprising videos.