TikTok owner, Beijing-based ByteDance, generated around 40 billion yuan ($5.64 billion) in revenue for the first quarter of this year, Reuters reported on Wednesday citing two people with knowledge of the matter.
The figure represents growth of more than 130% compared with the same period a year earlier, said one of the people.
ByteDance has set a 2020 revenue target of about 200 billion yuan, the other person said, according to the report.
The first person said ByteDance aims to reach revenue half that of rival Tencent Holdings which reported revenue of nearly 377 billion yuan in 2019.
The bulk of the company's revenue is mainly from advertising on its apps in China including news aggregator Jinri Toutiao as well as Douyin, its domestic version of TikTok, the people said, rather than from TikTok itself.
ByteDance had revenue of more than $17 billion and net profit of more than $3 billion last year, according to a Bloomberg report last month.
The data shows that ByteDance has become the most valuable startup in the world and is growing at a rapid pace.
ByteDance's $17 billion in revenue last year was more than double its total revenue for 2018 (about $7.4 billion).
ByteDance currently attracts about 1.5 billion monthly active users across a range of apps, including the TikTok short video platform, Jitter and news service app Toutiao.
ByteDance also scooped up Kevin Mayer of Walt Disney as CEO of TikTok in May.
Bloomberg previously reported that ByteDance, led by Zhang Yiming, is becoming a strong competitor to US internet giants Facebook and Alphabet.
Facebook-owned Instagram brought in about $20 billion in advertising revenue in 2019. Google's video division, for its part, claims YouTube's ad sales were $15.1 billion last year.
ByteDance is strengthening its presence in emerging areas such as e-commerce and gaming. This year, ByteDance kicked off a wave of hiring that is expected to add 40,000 jobs by 2020.
ByteDance hopes to equal e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding in terms of number of employees. And the big context right now is that major tech companies around the world are laying off staff.
ByteDance had very preliminary discussions about an initial public offering (IPO) last year, the report said, citing sources familiar with the matter. But given ByteDance's financial performance, the business isn't in a hurry to go public. Sources close to the matter also revealed that ByteDance currently has over $6 billion in cash on hand.
