ByteDance to enter VR industry by acquiring Pico
Recently, ByteDance is intensively advancing the layout of hardware and implementing specific actions. These advancements present themselves in capital operation and talent recruitment.
ByteDance plans to acquire Pico, the manufacturer with the largest shipments in the Chinese VR industry. The purchase amount is close to $771.8 million USD.
On the other hand, “New Stone Laboratory’’ the hardware R&D center established by ByteDance in 2019 has absorbed a group of talents from Apple and Snapchat this year.
Pico was established in 2015. The founder Hongwei Zhou was the vice president of the foundry giant “Goertek”. He oversaw the research and development of VR products of brands such as Sony and LeEco. In the past six years, Pico has experienced the highlighted emergence and the bubble burst of the VR industry. To date, aside from the VR departments attached to manufacturers such as iQiyi, Huawei, and Xiaomi, Pico has become the last man standing of the independent VR manufacturers.
Two points have recently stimulated Bytedance; Pico is currently scarce in the industry, and the eruption of the Facebook oculus has verified the feasibility of VR commercialization. Bytedance and Facebook have very similar tags: social, content, globalization. While Zuckerberg is reshaping a new “meta-universe”, Bytedance should hold onto a similar proposition: Applying Tiktok and Lark to the next generation of devices that will replace the handheld mobile phone, will also produce a more creative ecology for the original To C and To B contents.
