Image Source: Visual China

BEIJING, April 26 (TMTPOST) — TikTok’s parent company announced that veteran lawyer Julie Gao will be joining the company as chief financial officer (CFO) in May.

Gao will be based in Singapore and Hong Kong, according to the company’s CEO Liang Rubo.

Gao graduated from Peking University with a bachelor’s in law and later received her master’s in sociology from the University of Alabama and Juris Doctor from UCLA. Gao has been a lawyer for over twenty years.

Gao joined Skadden Arps, Skadden, or SASM&F as a partner in 2009. According to Gao’s bio on the firm’s official site, Gao has a diverse corporate practice representing public and private companies, private equity firms and global investment banks. She provided legal advice for a variety of capital markets transactions, involving the issuance of equity, convertible bonds and debt securities, as well as listing on the U.S., Hong Kong and Singapore stock exchanges, cross-border mergers and acquisitions, financial and strategic investments in public and private companies, MBOs, regulatory compliance and other corporate matters.

Gao was involved in ByteDance’s acquisition of Musical.ly, a social media app that was later integrated into TikTok, and gaming studio Moonton. Gao will start working for ByteDance in May, Reuters reported, citing a person with direct knowledge of the matter.

The appointment of a new CFO often means a company is planning to make new moves in the capital market. Gao's appointment comes after the position was vacant for about five months following the departure of ByteDance's former CFO Zhou Shouzi from the position last November. Zhou had been both Bytedance CFO and TikTok CEO for a few months in 2021. 

There are speculations that the appointment of Gao implies that ByteDance will restart its IPO process, which was stalled last year after Chinese regulators' warning over data security during its overseas listing.

ByteDance, a China-based tech company that owns video-sharing platform TikTok, saw its total revenue grow by 70% year-on-year to around US$58 billion in 2021, according to a news report from Reuters. In 2020, ByteDance's revenue more than doubled from the previous year to US$34.3 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported.