SoftBank Likely to Bid for TikTok’s India Assets: Report
Sep. 4, 2020SoftBank Group is reportedly in talks with Reliance Jio Infocomm and Airtelto bid for TikTok’s India operations. That’s according to a newBloombergreport citing sources familiar with the matter. A separateTechCrunchreportlast month had revealed Reliance Industries’ interest to invest in TikTok India.
As perBloomberg’s sources, SoftBank is preparing to assemble a group of bidders to potentially take over TikTok India and resume the company’s operations in the country. In case you didn’t know already,SoftBank is a stakeholder in TikTok’s parent company ByteDance.
The report suggests that SoftBank has shown interest in negotiations despite holding a minor stake in ByteDance. The Japanese multinational conglomerate brought Walmart in a group of investors including Google’s Alphabet. That effort didn’t materialize since the U.S. government reportedly wanted a US company to lead the investments. Since then, Google has expressed that it is no longer interested in the deal, whileWalmart teamed up with Microsoftin the bid.
TikTok had almost 200 million users before it got banned. Alongside TikTok, theIndian government banned 58 other appsciting national security reasons. Earlier this week, the governmentbanned yet another set of 118 appsincluding popular battle royalePUBG Mobile.
We will have to wait to see if SoftBank’s involvement in the negotiations would help lift TikTok’s ban in India. Now that TikTok is out of the race for the foreseeable future, severalTikTok-like appshave gained traction to fill the void, with the biggest one beingInstagram’s in-app Reels. Instagram is going all-in with its efforts to replicate the functionalities of TikTok and build on it.
Subin writes about consumer tech, software, and security. He secretly misses the headphone jack while pretending he’s better off with the wireless freedom.
