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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 top-rated 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.
The internet phenomenon controlled by billionaire Zhang Yiming has long been eyeing Southeast Asia’s increasingly smart phone-savvy 650 million residents, a region where Alibaba Group and Tencent Holdings 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 US 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 geographic proximity,” said Ling Vey-Sern, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. “The workforce is highly educated, tech-savvy and multilingual.”
In China, ByteDance also runs the news aggregation app Toutiao and TikTok’s Chinese twin Douyin. Together, its product stable has more than 1.5 billion monthly active users. ByteDance is said to have generated more than US $ 3 billion of net profit on more than US $ 17 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. US President, Donald Trump said Thursday that he will not extend his Sept. 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 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 OCBC founded.
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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