TikTok to invest billions of dollars in Southeast Asia, CEO says

TikTok, the short-video app owned by China’s ByteDance, said on Thursday it will invest billions of dollars in Southeast Asia over the next few years.

Southeast Asia, a region with a total population of 630 million people, half of whom are under the age of 30, is one of the largest markets for TikTok users.

But the platform has yet to turn its massive user base into a major e-commerce revenue generator in the region as it faces stiff competition from bigger rivals sea ​​area shrimp skin, Alibaba’s Zanda and go to encyclopedia.

“We will invest billions of dollars in Indonesia and Southeast Asia in the next few years,” TikTok Chief Executive Zhou Shouzi said at a forum organized in Jakarta to highlight the app’s social and economic impact on the region.

TikTok did not provide a breakdown of spending plans, but said it would invest in training, advertising and supporting small vendors looking to join its e-commerce platform, TikTok Shop.

Chew said content on its platform became more diverse as it added more users and expanded from advertising to e-commerce, allowing consumers to purchase items through links on the app during live broadcasts.

TikTok employs 8,000 people in Southeast Asia, and 2 million small vendors sell their wares on the platform in Indonesia, the region’s largest economy, he added.

Indonesia accounted for $52 billion of the nearly $100 billion in e-commerce transactions in the region last year, according to consultancy Momentum Works.

TikTok facilitated $4.4 billion in transactions in Southeast Asia last year, up from $600 million in 2021 but still far behind Shopee’s $48 billion in regional merchandise sales in 2022, Momentum Works said.

The planned investment in TikTok comes as the Chinese company faces scrutiny from some governments and regulators over concerns that Beijing may use the app to collect user data or advance its interests.

Countries including the UK and New Zealand have banned the app from government phones, a move TikTok said it believed was based on a “fundamental misunderstanding” and driven by broader geopolitics.

TikTok has repeatedly denied that it ever shared data with the Chinese government, saying it would not do so if asked.

The app has not faced a major ban on government devices in Southeast Asia, but its content has been censored.

Indonesia raised one of its first major global policy challenges in 2018 after authorities briefly banned TikTok for posts they deemed “pornographic, inappropriate and profane”.

In Vietnam, regulators said they would detection TikTok operates in the country because “toxic” content on the platform poses a threat to its “youth, culture and tradition”.