Under the Radar: What are the key drivers of growth for ByteDance’s super app for enterprises Lark?

Money Matters with Hongbin Jeong and Chua Tian Tian

Imagine a productivity super app for businesses to digitalise operations from HQ to storefront, streamline communications, and achieve operational efficiency – all in one place. That’s Lark for you.

Initially developed by Chinese social media giant ByteDance in 2016 for internal use, Lark started as a platform that aims to combine business processes and collaborative documents in a single platform to transform workplace collaboration.

The platform was later spun off in 2019 to become a subsidiary of ByteDance, providing tools for project management, video conferencing, chat, documentation, and automation to help enterprises simplify their workflows.

The firm serves some of the fastest growing companies from over 125 countries, ranging from Pop Mart, Atome, Xiaomi, Aeon Mall and even hotpot chain Haidilao, and is widely seen as a close competitor of Slack.

But how does Lark define its positioning within the industry and the geographical markets it wants to double down on?

Also, a technode article in December 2021 had said that Lark was aiming to achieve US$1 billion in global revenue from the five years counting from 2021.

Three years later, an Yicai Global report said in March 2024 that Lark is reportedly launching a downsizing initiative and a new round of organisational adjustments. But what were the reasons behind the move and how far is the Lark still in line with the earlier targets it had set out to achieve? What will be the key drivers of growth for the firm?

On Under the Radar, The Evening Runway’s finance presenter Chua Tian Tian posed these questions to Mark Dembitz, General Manager of APAC, Lark.

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