ByteDance Inc., the Chinese parent company of short-video platform TikTok, began a share buyback programme for current and former employees this week, sources said.

The ByteDance share buyback comes after the world's most valuable company announced in April that it had no plans for an IPO in the near future (IPO). According to Reuters, the company had planned to list some of its Chinese businesses, including TikTok's Chinese version Douyin, in Hong Kong.

ByteDance Ltd. is a Beijing-based Internet technology company. Zhang Yiming founded it in 2012. Toutiao, the core product of ByteDance, is a content platform in China and around the world.

Zhang Yiming unexpectedly announced last week that he will step down as CEO, a move that comes as Chinese regulators tighten their scrutiny of the country's largest technology firms.

ByteDance said in an email to current and former employees this week that eligible shareholders can apply to sell their holdings by June 20 at $126 per share for current employees and $100.80 per share for former employees.

The price for current employees during an earlier buyback last November was $60 a share, the sources said.

The nine-year-old company typically conducts share buybacks twice a year, according to the sources, who declined to be identified because the information is not public. Some ByteDance employees recently expressed their dissatisfaction on social media about their inability to sell their shares in an IPO.

The AI lab at ByteDance focuses on deep learning for understanding information (text, images, videos) and developing large-scale machine learning algorithms for personalised information recommendations.

Read More News :

Ziploan Partners with InCred to Provide Microloans to MSMEs

Pharmeasy acquires Medlife to Form India's largest Online Pharmacy