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BEIJING (BLOOMBERG) – ByteDance, 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 has applied for a license to operate a digital bank, said the sources, 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 its TikTok operations in the United States under pressure from the Trump administration.
ByteDance, the world’s most valued start-up company, is pushing ahead with its plans to take its social media services deeper into Asia after setbacks in India and Britain, as well as the United States.
The internet phenomenon controlled by billionaire Zhang Yiming has long been eyeing the increasingly smartphone-savvy 650 million residents in Southeast Asia, a region where Alibaba Group Holding 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.
US DEADLINE
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 (S $ 4.1 billion) of net profit on more than US $ 17 billion of revenue in 2019.
Asia is a growth area for the company, especially as it is increasingly likely to miss the US government deadline for the sale of its US TikTok operations.
President Donald Trump said on Thursday (September 10) that he will not extend his 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 is exploring gathering a pool of bidders for the TikTok assets in India.
The British 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 who founded OCBC Bank.
The regulator will grant up to five such permits to non-banks by December.
Ant Group and Sea backed by Tencent have also applied.
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