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ByteDance Ltd, the Chinese owner of the video-sharing app TikTok, plans to make Singapore its beachhead for the rest of Asia as part of its global expansion, according to people familiar with the matter.
The Beijing-based company seeks to spend several billion dollars and add hundreds of jobs over the next three years in the city-state, where it applied for a license to operate a digital bank, said the people, who asked not to be. . identified due to confidentiality.
The investment would come at a crucial time as the tech company is forced to sell TikTok’s operations in the US under pressure from the Trump administration.
ByteDance, the world’s most valued startup, is pushing ahead with its plans to take its social media services deeper into Asia after setbacks in India and the UK, as well as the US. Billionaire Zhang Yiming has long been eyeing the 650 million increasingly smartphone-savvy residents of Southeast Asia, a region where Alibaba Group Holding Ltd and Tencent Holdings Ltd are also making strides.
Plans for Singapore include establishing a data center, the people said. Its operations there include TikTok and Lark, an enterprise software company.
ByteDance currently has more than 200 job openings in Singapore, for positions in everything from payments to e-commerce to data privacy, according to its job referral site. The company already has 400 employees working in technology, sales and marketing in the city-state, one of the people said.
A representative for ByteDance did not offer comment.
Southeast Asia is rapidly evolving into a critical location for China’s largest tech corporations, from Alibaba to Tencent, in the face of growing hostility from the United States and other major developed markets. Singapore is becoming a regional base for both Western and Chinese companies due to its developed financial and legal system, and as Beijing tightens its grip on Hong Kong.
“Singapore is very attractive to technology companies looking for a hub to address the Southeast Asian markets due to its geographic proximity,” said Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Vey-Sern Ling. “The workforce is highly educated, tech-savvy and multilingual.”
In China, ByteDance also runs a news aggregation app Toutiaoand Douyin, TikTok’s Chinese twin. Together, its product stable has more than 1.5 billion monthly active users. ByteDance is said to have generated more than US $ 3 billion (RM12.46 billion) of net profit on more than US $ 17 billion (RM70.66 billion) of revenue in 2019.
US Deadline
Asia is a growth area for the company, especially as it is increasingly likely to miss the US government’s deadline for the sale of its US TikTok operations. President Donald Trump said the September 10 which will not extend its September 15 deadline for the deal.
In India, TikTok is among more than a hundred consumer apps made in China that are banned by the government for security reasons. SoftBank Group Corp is exploring gathering a pool of bidders for the TikTok assets in India.
The UK government is likely to ban TikTok from moving local user data out of the country, Bloomberg News reported.
ByteDance leads a consortium that has applied for a digital banking license from the Monetary Authority of Singapore. Other members of that group include a private investment firm owned by a member of the Lee family that founded Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp.
The regulator will grant up to five such permits to non-banks by December. Ant Group and Sea Ltd, backed by Tencent, have also applied. – Bloomberg
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