TikTok's international arm hit $9.1 billion while Washington was breaking up its US business

TikTok's UK-registered entity, which runs the UK, Europe and Latin America, reported revenue of $9.1 billion for 2025, growth the company puts at 45.7% ^[1]. It did that in the same year the app briefly went dark in the United States and vanished from American app stores, and ended with the Trump administration brokering an Oracle-led partial buyout of the US operation in December ^[2][3].

That sequence is the point. Anyone who cut international spend because of Washington headlines was reading a US-specific political event as a platform-wide one. TikTok's filing attributes the growth in those three regions to a rising user base, the scaling of TikTok Shop and live streaming ^[4]. None of those levers ran through Congress.

The profit line moved with it. The entity made $702.5 million in profit after a $657.3 million loss in 2024 and a $1.36 billion loss in 2023 ^[5], a swing of roughly $1.36 billion in twelve months ^[1]. Directors called 2025 "an inflection point in the group's transition from a capital investment phase to sustained operating profitability" ^[6]. Read the next line before accepting that. Operating profit on a pre-tax basis was $280.4 million ^[7], with the rest of the reported figure padded by tax credits claimed from earlier loss-making years ^[8] - about $422 million of the difference ^[2]. This is a business that has stopped burning cash, not one with a $700 million earnings engine.

Two other numbers deserve attention from anyone benchmarking their own cost base. Sales, marketing and admin costs grew 40.4% while headcount in that unit fell to 6,842 from almost 8,000 ^[9], a reduction of about 14.5% ^[3]. Costs per remaining head rose steeply. That is either aggressive paid acquisition or expensive compliance, and the filing as summarised does not separate the two.

Europe is where the bill sits. TikTok has set aside nearly $1 billion for potential regulatory fines and lawsuits, across two pages devoted to legal exposure ^[10], while noting liabilities that could reach tens of billions ^[11]. Ireland's Data Protection Commission has already fined it $370 million in September 2023 over children's data and $690 million in May 2025 over Chinese staff access to European user data ^[12][13]; both are under appeal ^[14]. Those two fines alone total $1.06 billion, above the provision ^[4]. A second DPC investigation into European data stored in China produced a statement of issues in April 2026, carrying a possible penalty of up to 4% of global revenue ^[15] - roughly $7.4 billion against ByteDance's reported $186 billion 2025 revenue ^[16][17]. The provision covers about 13% of that single exposure ^[5]. The EU has at least four further cases open under the Digital Services Act, covering addictive design, children, alleged interference in Romania's 2024 presidential election and researcher data access ^[18]. TikTok's answer so far includes Project Clover, a $14 billion, ten-year European data centre commitment announced in 2023 ^[19], averaging $1.4 billion a year ^[6].

One discrepancy is worth resolving before the numbers get reused: revenue of $9.1 billion against a prior-year $4.5 billion implies growth of about 102%, not the 45.7% cited ^[7]. Check the filing itself.

What to watch: whether the DPC's second case converts the statement of issues into a percentage-of-global-revenue fine, since that is the only European exposure large enough to reprice the business ^[15]; whether the near-$1 billion provision is raised at the next filing ^[10]; and whether pre-tax operating profit grows once the tax credits from loss years are exhausted ^[7][8].