ByteDance sues Tencent: China’s tech companies are now fighting each other

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Douyin, the Chinese version of the short-form video application TikTok, sued Tencent (TCEHY) on Tuesday, claiming the Shenzhen-based social media firm has abused its “market dominance” to wipe out rivals.
Douyin, which as TikTok is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, filed a lawsuit alleging that Tencent’s WeChat and QQ messaging apps ban its users from sharing Douyin content for three years, the company said Tuesday in a statement he posted to his official WeChat account. .

Although CNN Business has not seen the lawsuit filed in the Beijing Intellectual Property Court, several state media outlets, including the Beijing Daily, have reported that Douyin is asking Tencent to lift the content restrictions and pay $ 90 million. yuan ($ 14 million) in economic losses and fees.

“We believe competition is better for consumers and promotes innovation,” a Douyin spokesman said in a statement to CNN Business. “We have filed this lawsuit to protect our rights and those of our users.”

Tencent he fired again and said his own statement Tuesday on WeChat that he also plans to sue ByteDance.

“ByteDance’s pertinent allegations are a purely false and malicious framing,” Tencent said. He accused Douyin of having “WeChat user information obtained illegally” and infringing on consumers’ rights.

ByteDance and Tencent are two of the major players on Chinese social media. Tencent’s WeChat has more than 1.2 billion monthly active users, while its QQ app has about 700 million monthly active users. Douyin of ByteDance does not publish monthly data, but said last month that it averages about 600 million active users every day.

The two companies have been in dispute for some time. Since 2018, they have accused each other of unfair competition, a dispute that has occasionally been played out in the courts. Even the Chinese media have nicknamed the scoop “Tou-Teng big fight,” a pun that uses ByteDance’s “Toutiao” news app and Tencent’s Chinese name “Teng Xun”.

But the struggle is gaining new importance now, coming at a time of convulsions in the Chinese technology industry.

Last November, Chinese regulators obtained a long-awaited initial public offering from Ant Group, the financial subsidiary of Jack Ma’s Alibaba. (BABA) Since then, they have told the company to review its business and criticized it for withdrawing rivals from the market.

Regulators have also issued new guidelines saying they intend to avoid Internet monopolies and have even opened an investigation into Alibaba over antitrust issues.

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