TikTok says it is planning to invest billions of dollars in Southeast Asia, a region that is proving to be one of the short video platform’s key markets.
“We will invest billions of dollars in Indonesia and Southeast Asia over the next few years,” said TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew. quoted by Agence France-Pressevia The South China Morning Post.
“From a modest team of about 100 people, we now have close to 8,000 employees in Southeast Asia.”
Chew did not say how much money the company plans to spend specifically for an area with a population of 630 million people, half of whom are under the age of 30, Reuters reported. report.
TikTok CEO spoke at a forum hosted by TikTok in Singapore, where the Bytedance-owned platform sells to attendees thanks to TikTok’s power as a commerce platform.
Chew’s comment came on the same day as the release a report from Singapore-based consulting firm Momentum Works, shows the significant strides TikTok has made as an e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia – and how far it is falling behind. several regional competitors.
Overall, the report found that TikTok is the fastest-growing e-commerce platform in the region, with gross merchandise value (GMV) sales on the platform skyrocketing. $4.4 billion in 2022, compared to $600,000 in 2021. That gives it the fastest growth rate of any e-commerce platform in the region.
However, TikTok is still far behind Shopee, the platform owned by Sea Ltd. based in Singapore, with GMV as 47.9 billion USD in 2022. In second place is Lazada, a subsidiary of the China-based group Alibaba Groupwith 20.1 billion USD in GVV.
Indonesia is by far the largest e-commerce market in the region, with 52% in total GMV, the Momentum Works report said.
The report sees a lot of potential for TikTok to expand its e-commerce presence. It forecasts that the total GMV on e-commerce platforms in Southeast Asia will double within the next 5 years, from about 100 billion USD every year today comes mid $175 billion And 232 billion USD to 2028.
Expanding its role as an e-commerce platform isn’t TikTok’s only plan; the platform has also moved into the music business, a fact that sometimes makes it at odds with major players in the music industry.
Earlier this year, TikTok deal with Snoop Dogg that will see the hip-hop artist’s catalog appear exclusively on TikTok for a certain period of time before it appears on other streaming platforms.
Around the same time, it was reported that some TikTok users in Australia had Can’t use some music that’s licensed by major label In their videos, it seems to be an experiment to prove that TikTok video makers don’t need big label music to produce videos. (Music is often the driving force behind video discovery on TikTok.)
“We will invest billions of dollars in Indonesia and Southeast Asia over the next few years… From a modest team of around 100 people, we now have close to 8,000 employees in Southeast Asia.”
Tho Tu Nhai, TikTok
A year ago, TikTok launches its own music distribution platformSoundOn, which allows creators to upload their music directly to TikTok, ByteDances’ music streaming app Resso and other services like Spotify.
Last month, the company show what it calls the “Artist Impact Program,” which allows artists to opt into TikTok’s Commercial Music Library, a category of more than 1 million rights removed songs are sourced from a “widespread network of partnerships”.
However, TikTok’s plans to grow its involvement in the e-commerce and music sectors are being challenged by the political issues the company is facing, amid rising tensions between China and China. and Western countries.
Chew faced a grilling that lasted four and a half hours before the US Congress This spring, in which the CEO was repeatedly challenged to assure lawmakers that the personal data of TikTok users in the United States would not be transferred to China.
Chew highlighted TikTok’s “Operation Texas,” an ongoing project to move US users’ data from servers in China to Oracle servers in Texas. However, he acknowledged that the Texas facility is still not fully operational and that some of the ByteDance engineers in China have access to user data in the United States.
Several governments around the world have banned employees from using TikTok on government-issued devices because of security concerns. Among them are UK, France, AustraliaAmerica as well some US statesand European Commission.
However, the state of Montana went a step further, with the governor signed into law a bill to completely ban TikTok from the state. The law punishes any app store that makes apps available to users in the state, but limits the penalty to app stores, not app users.
TikTok has filed a First Amendment (freedom of speech) challenge before the law, while a group of TikTok users in the state have file their own legal challengeon the same basis.Global Music Business
