Due to sour relations and data-security related issues with China, the video-sharing social networking service Tik Tok, owned by the Chinese Internet technology company ByteDance, has seen its worst hit in two of its biggest markets, namely: India and the United States.
This is pretty bad for Tik Tok, as both the countries contributed over 100 million users, individually.
Amidst all of this, it has been reported that Walmart will be joining forces with Microsoft to buy Tik Tok’s operations in the U.S., as confirmed by Walmart yesterday.
Walmart Teams up with Microsoft
Bytedance has decided to sell its Tik Tok’s operations in U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand and is about to close on an agreement in a deal, which is anticipated to be valued at about $20-$30 billion.
In fact, Walmart+Microsoft isn’t the only contender in hopes to close the winning deal with Bytedance.
Several other companies include Oracle.
As per a statement by Walmart,
“We believe a potential relationship with TikTok US in partnership with Microsoft could add this key functionality and provide Walmart with an important way for us to reach and serve omnichannel customers as well as grow our third-party marketplace and advertising businesses.
We are confident that a Walmart and Microsoft partnership would meet both the expectations of US TikTok users while satisfying the concerns of US government regulators.”
Why is Bytedance selling Tik Tok in the U.S.?
In July, the U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the Trump administration is planning to ban Tik Tok, along with other Chinese applications, as they are concerned that the Chinese government may misuse the data collected by such apps.
Thus, Trump issued an executive order giving Bytedance 45 days to sell Tik Tok’s operations in the US to an American company, or they would ban its operation in the U.S.
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