While the whole of 2025 was spent debating whether TikTok would stay in the US at all, its European business quietly moved into profit. According to the British accounts of the entity through which the app runs Europe, Africa and Latin America, that region finished in profit for the first time. And the very engine that got it there is now under scrutiny from the European Commission.
The US year, by contrast, was tense. In January 2025 the app briefly disappeared from app stores in the US, before at the end of the year the administration of Donald Trump brokered a buyout of part of the US operation, led by Oracle. Attention focused on Washington. Meanwhile the European business grew.
Nine billion in a region where TikTok used to lose money
Revenue from that part of the business reached roughly $9.1 billion in 2025. That is more than three times the $2.6 billion the same region brought in during 2022. Until now TikTok had been piling up losses here. This year it finished in profit for the first time.
For scale, according to Forbes, citing Bloomberg, the whole parent company ByteDance reported revenue of around $186 billion last year, without publishing anything about its global results. This region is thus only a fraction of the group, but one that has just stopped losing money.
Growth driven by TikTok Shop and live streaming
TikTok attributes the growth in its accounts to a growing user base, the scaling of its shopping platform TikTok Shop and live-streaming features, which have turned the app into a commerce channel on the model of China.
For a brand such as a European e-shop, this matters more than the lines in the accounts. TikTok Shop moves the app from a place where awareness is built to a place where people buy directly. Live shopping, common for years on China’s Douyin, is becoming a sales channel in Europe too. The user base and in-app purchases are what pushed the region into profit.
Fines and investigations from Dublin and Brussels
Profit arrives at the moment when TikTok’s costs in the European market are shifting into the regulatory sphere. In May 2025 it received from the Irish Data Protection Commission a fine of €530 million for breaching the GDPR. Of that sum, €485 million related to transfers of European users’ data to China, and €45 million to insufficient transparency. The regulator also ordered remedies within six months and threatened to halt the transfers. TikTok itself had found only in February 2025 that some European users’ data had indeed ended up on servers in China, although it had previously claimed the opposite.
Alongside this runs a Digital Services Act proceeding. In February 2026 the European Commission preliminarily found that the app’s addictive design breaches the DSA, specifically infinite scrolling, autoplay, push notifications and a strongly personalised recommender system, which in its view switch users into “autopilot” mode. In July 2026 it added another preliminary finding that TikTok does not adequately protect minors’ accounts, which can be set to public and whose content the system recommends to adults as well.
These are so far preliminary findings, not final decisions, and TikTok can defend itself. If the Commission confirms them, the DSA allows fines of up to 6% of global annual turnover.
TikTok’s European business is for the first time behaving like an independent, profit-making company. The source of that profit is a feed that holds attention and purchases built straight into it. Dublin and Brussels are now examining exactly this. For TikTok, the cost of doing business in Europe now includes a regulator.
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