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reTiktok’s business in the United States has apparently been saved. Donald Trump over the weekend gave preliminary approval to a partnership of the popular smartphone app with software company Oracle and retailer Walmart. The alliance still needs official government authorization, but it is now likely that Americans can continue to use Tiktok as before. It was only on Friday that the Commerce Department announced a ban that would have meant the app could no longer be downloaded or updated in the United States as of Sunday.
The ministry has postponed the ban until next Sunday, but in light of the deal approved by Trump, it may be completely out of date. In addition to Tiktok, a suspension of the short message service Wechat, which belongs to the Chinese group Tencent, which is not affected by the alliance that has now been announced, was announced in America. However, a California court overturned them Sunday with a court order.
The alliance that has now been concluded does not result in a complete sale of Tiktok in the United States, as Trump had initially requested. Oracle and Walmart will become minority shareholders and will have a 20 percent stake going forward. Including American investors already involved in Bytedance, Tiktok’s Chinese parent company, the app should be slightly more than 50 percent in American hands in the future. He will join a new company called “Tiktok Global”, which is based in the United States and has a majority American board of directors. The company will be listed on the US stock exchange in the next twelve months.
Trump expects new jobs
Trump said Saturday that Tiktok would create 25,000 jobs in his country. He also said that in relation to the alliance, the US government should receive five billion dollars for an education initiative, although it is not clear how it will be carried out. Meanwhile, the president had demanded that the government receive part of any purchase price for Tiktok, but had backed away from it.
The future of Tiktok has been struggling for weeks. Trump had announced that he wanted to ban the app in his country unless it was sold to a US company. As a justification, he referred to concerns that Tiktok could transmit data from US users to the Chinese government. At first, Microsoft was the frontrunner to take over Tiktok entirely, until an Oracle and Walmart alliance emerged as the solution. It should be Oracle’s job to ensure the security of Tiktok in the future.
In response to the announcement of the ban on Tiktok and Wechat, the Chinese government responded on Saturday with a threat that was interpreted in many places as a retaliatory attack. After the Beijing Commerce Department denounced Washington’s recent anti-China measures as “harassment,” it issued a second statement that it would establish a blacklist of “unreliable institutions” with a series of sanctions. could. After Trump announced a little later that he had approved the deal between Oracle, Walmart and Bytedance, the Chinese government appeared to be weakening its threat of retaliation. There is no “timetable” for blacklists, the Commerce Department said Sunday. No companies have yet been selected to land on it. “If foreign companies do not commit illegal acts, there is nothing to worry about,” he said in a statement.
This wait-and-see attitude is in line with what Chinese diplomats had announced in the FAZs in recent weeks: that Beijing would not retaliate on a large scale before the US presidential election that could affect US iPhone maker Apple. Yet Beijing apparently doesn’t want to scare foreign investors too much and instead wait to see how America’s attitude toward the country develops after the November presidential election. Over the past few weeks, observers have repeatedly pointed out that the short film app Tiktok, in which users sing and dance, is far less important to China’s leadership around party leader Xi Jinping than the fate of the company’s Chinese technology Huawei, which was also heavily attacked by Trump.
China is satisfied
On Sunday, the influential editor-in-chief of the Beijing ultra-nationalist party newspaper “Global Times”, Hu Xijin, expressed his satisfaction with the outcome of the Tiktoks fight in an editorial. It is still unfair that Washington extorted part of the sale. But because Bytedance can now keep so much of its app, the company loses less money than a full sale or ban.
Tiktok’s parent company in Beijing told the newspaper that it was jointly protecting user data with Oracle, following the example of Apple, which was forced by China to store iCloud user data in data centers in China. In general, the Chinese government, which demonstratively issued export restrictions for certain Chinese technologies during the Tiktok dispute, “was not a stranger” during the sale process, but was always involved. Now Beijing must approve the deal with Oracle. Washington couldn’t just get what it wanted.
