(Bloomberg) — Just last year, the world’s most valuable startup, ByteDance Ltd., was being squeezed from all sides.The Trump administration wanted the Chinese firm, which owns the ubiquitous TikTok video-sharing platform, to get rid of assets. Beijing was cracking down on tech businesses, and India blacklisted some of its social-media apps.For all the obstacles, ByteDance kept growing. Now its founder, 38-year-old Zhang Yiming, is among the world’s richest people — a distinction that lately has carried increased risks in China.Shares of the company trade in the private market at a valuation of more than $250 billion, people familiar with the dealings have said. At that level, Zhang, who owns about a quarter of ByteDance, could be worth more than $60 billion, placing him alongside Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s Pony Ma, bottled-water king Zhong Shanshan and members of the Walton and Koch families in the U.S., according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.ByteDance, famous for its short-video apps and news aggregator Toutiao, more than doubled revenue last year after expanding beyond its core advertising business into areas such as e-commerce and online gaming. It’s now weighing options for the initial public offering of some businesses.“Zhang is someone who’s known for thinking long-term and not easily dissuaded by short-term setbacks,” said Ma Rui, partner at venture-capital firm Synaptic Ventures. “He is set on building an enduring, global business.”Surging ValuationDuring its last fundraising round, ByteDance reached a $180 billion valuation, a person with knowledge of the matter said. That’s up from $20 billion about three years ago, according to CB Insights. But in the private market, some investors recently were asking for the equivalent of a $350 billion valuation to part with their shares, people familiar have said. The company’s value for private-equity investors is approaching $400 billion, the South China Morning Post reported. That would mean an even bigger fortune for Zhang.ByteDance representatives didn’t respond to requests for comment.It’s a tough time to be wealthy in China as the government seeks to rein in the country’s most powerful corporations and their billionaire founders. Just ask Jack Ma: After opening an antitrust probe, regulators fined Alibaba a record $2.8 billion and the central bank ordered an overhaul of his Ant Group Co. fintech empire so it’d be supervised more like a bank. On Tuesday, China ordered 34 internet companies to rectify their anti-competitive practices in the coming month. While ByteDance hasn’t been singled out as a target, its dominance in social media and war chest for deal-making are sensitive areas the government is looking into.“There are no more silly games in the U.S. with Trump and potential bans or forced asset sales,” said Kirk Boodry, founder of investment research firm Redex Holdings. “But the pressure on tech-share prices and China in particular might make $250 billion a tough sell,” he added, referring to ByteDance’s value in private transactions.Born in the southern Chinese city of Longyan, Zhang, the only son of civil servants, studied programming at Tianjin’s Nankai University, where he built a following on the school’s online forum by fixing classmates’ computers. He joined Microsoft Corp. for a brief stint after graduating, later calling the job so boring he often “worked half of the day and read books in the other half,” according to an interview with Chinese media. He went on to develop several ventures, including a real estate search portal.His breakthrough came in 2012, when working in a four-bedroom apartment in Beijing he created ByteDance’s first hit — a joke-sharing app later shut down by censors. It then turned to news aggregation before winning over more than 1 billion global users with its short-video platforms TikTok and Chinese twin app, Douyin. In the process, it attracted big-name investors such as SoftBank Group Corp., Sequoia Capital and proprietary-trading firm Susquehanna International Group, making it a rarity among Chinese internet startups that usually get absorbed into the wider ecosystems of Tencent and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.Novel ConceptOne of Zhang’s earliest supporters, Susquehanna has become ByteDance’s largest outside backer with a 15% stake, according to a Wall Street Journal story in October. The initial bet was made at the start of 2012, when ByteDance’s news app Toutiao was just a concept that Zhang had drawn up on napkins, according to a 2016 blog post by Joan Wang, who led that investment for Susquehanna’s Chinese venture-capital unit.With TikTok facing scrutiny in the U.S. and India, Zhang has put more effort into ByteDance’s nascent and fast-growing Chinese businesses, which range from gaming to education to e-commerce. That helped it increase sales to about $35 billion last year and operating profit to $7 billion, a person familiar with the results said.Investors are eyeing the IPO of some of ByteDance’s businesses after Chinese competitor Kuaishou Technology raised $5.4 billion in February in the biggest internet listing since Uber Technologies Inc., with its market value now nearing $140 billion. Last month, ByteDance hired former Xiaomi Corp. executive Chew Shou Zi as its chief financial officer, filling a long vacant position that will be crucial for its eventual market offering.But for Zhang, it’s not all about immediate payoffs. The affable founder is known for his business philosophy of “delaying satisfactions” as he puts the focus on long-term growth — a message he stressed again during his spiel to employees at the company’s ninth anniversary celebration last month.“Keep an ordinary mind, that’s something that sounds easy but important to do,” he said. “Put in the plainest words, when hungry, eat, when tired, sleep.”(Adds latest on China crackdown in ninth paragraph)For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2021 Bloomberg L.P.

(Bloomberg) — Grab Holdings Inc., Southeast Asia’s most valuable startup, is going public in the U.S. through the largest-ever merger with a blank-check company.The Singapore-based startup is set to have a market value of about $39.6 billion after the combination with Altimeter Growth Corp., the special purpose acquisition company of Brad Gerstner’s Altimeter Capital Management, the firms said in a statement Tuesday. Grab is raising more than $4 billion from investors including BlackRock Inc., Fidelity International and T. Rowe Price Group Inc. as part of the biggest U.S. equity offering by a Southeast Asian company.The deal would make the ride-hailing and food-delivery giant the first Southeast Asian tech unicorn to go public through a SPAC and give it funds to expand. Grab is trying to take advantage of a U.S.-led SPAC listing boom even though it’s showing signs of slowing amid increased scrutiny by regulators.“This is definitely one of the best internet companies,” Gerstner said in an interview. “The runway ahead is very long and very wide for Grab if they continue to execute.”The combined entity’s stock will trade on the Nasdaq in the coming months under the ticker GRAB. Altimeter Capital, which orchestrated the initial public offering of Altimeter Growth in September, is putting $750 million into the company, about a fifth of the fresh funds raised.That, together with a three-year lockup period for its sponsor shares, indicates Altimeter’s long-term commitment to the company, Grab Chief Executive Officer Anthony Tan said. Altimeter, which manages $15 billion of assets, has also committed as much as $500 million to a contingent investment to be equal to the total amount of redemptions by Altimeter Growth’s shareholders.“From sovereign wealth funds to mutual funds, it is world-class investors who are investing in us,” Tan said in an interview. “The world is seeing the potential of Southeast Asia and how exciting this region is.”Shares in Altimeter Growth surged about 10% Tuesday in New York.Grab, the market leader in Southeast Asia for so-called super apps for consumer services, expects its addressable market to expand to more than $180 billion by 2025 from $52 billion in 2020. Its total gross merchandise volume last year was $12.5 billion, more than doubling from 2018 even as competition from arch rival Gojek intensified and the coronavirus pandemic restricted people’s movements.The deal marks a remarkable turn for Grab. Under pressure from SoftBank Group Corp. and other investors, the company had been negotiating a possible merger with Indonesia’s Gojek for most of 2020. But the talks ultimately collapsed around December and Gojek began talks with Tokopedia, another local internet giant.Tan and Gerstner, both Harvard Business School graduates, began talking about a deal early this year after being introduced by common friends. Only about three months later, they reached an agreement for the record transaction.Gerstner is no stranger to Southeast Asia, having invested in Singapore-based gaming and e-commerce leader Sea Ltd. The Tencent Holdings Ltd.-backed company has emerged as a stock-market sensation since going public in New York in 2017. Among companies valued at $100 billion or more, the stock is the No. 1 Asian performer since the start of last year and trails only Tesla Inc. globally.“The U.S. and China have been big investment markets for 20 years and before Sea, Southeast Asia wasn’t really on many investors’ radar screens,” said Gerstner, who has been following Grab since its 2018 acquisition of the regional business of Uber Technologies Inc., another company he’s backed. “Now you have a second business with a $40 billion market cap which is going to be listed on the Nasdaq. This is a huge moment for global investors realizing the renaissance that’s occurring in Southeast Asia technology market.”Tan founded Grab in his native Malaysia as a taxi-hailing app in 2012 with Hooi Ling Tan, a Harvard classmate. They kicked off operations in Kuala Lumpur as what was then known as MyTeksi, allowing users to book cabs.Grab later relocated to Singapore before expanding as a ride-hailing app from Indonesia to Vietnam, the Philippines, Cambodia and Myanmar. With more than $10 billion raised from investors led by SoftBank over eight funding rounds, Grab became Southeast Asia’s largest ride-hailing provider before expanding into food delivery, digital payments and financial services across eight countries in the region.Working toward profitability, Grab lost about $800 million last year, on an Ebitda basis, on adjusted sales of $1.6 billion. It’s predicting earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization to become positive in 2023, reaching $500 million that year. The company is forecasting average annual sales growth of 42% for the next three years, with adjusted revenue hitting $4.5 billion in 2023.Grab said its mobility-services business is already making money in all its markets, while food delivery is in the black in five of six markets. The company said it had about 72% of Southeast Asia’s ride-hailing market, 50% of online food delivery and 23% of digital wallet payments last year. Grab was previously valued at about $16 billion, a person with knowledge of the matter said.Among companies participating in the cash injection, a so-called private investment in public equity, or PIPE, are Singapore’s state-owned investor Temasek Holdings Pte, Janus Henderson Group Plc and Nuveen LLC. The expected market value also reflects the PIPE and SPAC proceeds of $4.5 billion as well as a $2 billion term loan, according to Grab.Evercore Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Morgan Stanley advised Grab in the deal.(Updates with sales, earnings forecasts in 16th paragraph.)For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2021 Bloomberg L.P.

The Singapore-based firm started as a ride-hailing company and has since expanded.

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