ByteDance is in talks with Reliance Industries to buy stake in TikTok
- ByteDance is in early discussions with Reliance to back TikTok’s India bussiness.
- TikTok’s India business is valued at $3 billion.
- India was TikTok’s largest market outside China.
ByteDance has engaged Reliance Industries to buy a stake in TikTok in a hope to appease the Indian government and restart it’s India operations. This move might save TikTok in in largest market by sheer number of users.
TikTok was among the 59 apps banned by the Indian government sighting data security and user privacy concerns. This also comes at a time of rising geo-political tensions between India and China.
India was TikTok’s largest market outside China with over 200 million users. TikTok’s India business is valued at $3 billion. ByteDance, which owns TikTok employs 200 people in India. Their fate depends on ByteDance being able to convince the Indian government to resume it’s operations or to sell itself. But they are running a race against time since multiple competitors are emerging in the market to fill the void left by Tiktok, including Facebook.
Neither ByteDance nor Reliance have commented on this.
Investing in TikTok could help Reliance gain a stronger hold in the consumer market with a foray into a new section of the market, i.e., social media. This coming at a time when Jio Platforms, a subsidiary of Reliance Industries, has gotten around $20 billion investments from giants like Facebook, Google, Intel, Qualcomm among 10 others.
Meanwhile, ByteDance is also in conversations with Microsoft to sell TikTok’s foreign operations to a tune of $30-$50 billion.
