Parent Company of Tiktok Buys Pico for 1.5 Billion USD

Bytedance , the parent company of Tiktok, buys Chinese VR headset maker Pico for 9 billion RMB (1.5 billion USD). This is almost in parallel with Facebook's acquisition of Oculus for 2 billion USD back in 2014. Oculus is still the number one VR headset in the market right now.

Founded in 2015, Pico is a leading company in the field of VR hardware in China. The company has raised over $66 million from venture capitalists to-date, and currently has over 300 employees.

Its founder Zhou Hongwei was the vice president of Goertek Acoustics and was in charge of the research and development of VR products of brands such as Sony and Le.com. According to the China AR/VR market report for the fourth quarter of 2020 released by the market analysis agency IDC in March earlier this year. Pico has the largest share of the domestic mainland VR market in 2020. However, due to consumer habit differences and content availability, Pico is still performing far below Oculus Quest 2.

It is believes that Bytedance's acquisition of Pico will only help to quickly construct a complete VR content ecosystem, which is great news for the domestic mainland China VR market.