TikTok Owner ByteDance to Spend Billions in Singapore After U.S. Ban

TikTok is the most downloaded app of 2020, as quarantines have spurred more and more users to hop onboard and learn about the latest dance trends and memes. But the app also faces a slew of regulatory hurdles, privacy concerns, and allegations of censorship, issues experts say will be new CEO Kevin Mayer’s top priority.

Bill Gates Says U.S. Data From TikTok Safe With Microsoft

Jul.07 -- President Donald Trump says he is considering banning TikTok in the U.S. over threats to national security as tensions continue to rise with China. Bloomberg’s Selina Wang reports on “Bloomberg Markets: China Open.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2020-09-11/tiktok-owner-to-spend-billions-in-singapore-video >

• ByteDance looks to add hundreds of jobs in the nation: people
• Chinese company wants Singapore to be base for rest of Asia

ByteDance Ltd., the Chinese owner of video-sharing app TikTok, is planning to make Singapore its beachhead for the rest of Asia as part of its global expansion, according to people familiar with the matter.

The Beijing-based company is looking to spend several billion dollars and add hundreds of jobs over the next three years in the city-state, where it has applied for a license to operate a digital bank, said the people, who asked not to be identified because of confidentiality.

The investment would come at a crucial time as the technology firm is forced to sell TikTok operations in the U.S. under pressure by the Trump administration.

ByteDance, the world’s most richly valued startup, is plowing ahead with plans to take its social media services deeper into Asia after setbacks in India and the U.K. as well as the U.S.

The internet phenomenon controlled by billionaire Zhang Yiming has long eyed Southeast Asia’s 650 million increasingly smartphone-savvy population, a region where Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. are also making inroads.

Read how TikTok becomes part of U.S.-China flashpoints

The plans for Singapore include establishment of a data center, the people said. Its operations there include TikTok and Lark, an enterprise software business.

ByteDance currently has more than 200 job openings in Singapore, for positions in everything from payments to e-commerce and data privacy, according to its job referral site.

The company already has 400 employees working on technology, sales and marketing in the city-state, one of the people said.

A ByteDance representative offered no comment.

Shopping Spree

Southeast Asia's e-commerce is on track to top $150 billion in 2025

2015 $:5.5B 2019: $38.2B 2025: $153B

Source: Google & Temasek / Bain, e-Conomy SEA 2019

Gross merchandise value

Southeast Asia is rapidly evolving into a critical location for China’s largest tech corporations from Alibaba to Tencent in the face of growing hostility from the U.S. and other major developed markets. Singapore is becoming a regional base for both Western and Chinese companies because of its developed financial and legal system, and as Beijing tightens its grip on Hong Kong.

“Singapore is highly attractive to tech firms looking for a hub to address the Southeast Asian markets due to geographic proximity,” said Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Vey-Sern Ling.

“The workforce is highly educated, tech savvy and multilingual.”

In China, ByteDance also runs news aggregation app Toutiao, and TikTok’s Chinese twin Douyin. Collectively its stable of products have more than 1.5 billion monthly active users.

ByteDance is said to have generated more than $3 billion of net profit on more than $17 billion of revenue in 2019.

U.S. Deadline

Asia is a growth area for the company, especially when it is increasingly likely to miss the U.S. government’s deadline for the sale of its TikTok U.S. operations. President Donald Trump said Thursday he won’t extend his Sept. 15 deadline for the deal.

In India, TikTok is among more than a hundred Chinese-made consumer apps that are banned by the government on concerns about security. SoftBank Group Corp. is exploring gathering a group of bidders for TikTok’s India assets.

The U.K. government will likely ban TikTok from moving local user data out of the country, Bloomberg News has reported.

Gateway

Singapore, in particular, offers ByteDance the opportunity to explore an area it’s had relatively little exposure to. The company is leading a consortium that has applied for a digital-bank license from the Monetary Authority of Singapore. Other members of that group includes a private investment firm owned by a member of the Lee family that founded Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp.

The regulator will award as many as five such permits to non-banks by December. Ant Group and Tencent-backed Sea Ltd. have also applied. The city-state offers a potential gateway to the rest of Southeast Asia, where the digital lending market may reach $110 billion by 2025, according to a report by Bain & Co., Google and Temasek Holdings Pte.

(Updates with details from penultimate paragraph)

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Services fair aims to revive global trade, providing venue for prospective business partners to meet

People look at an unmanned delivery vehicle at the booth of Meituan at the comprehensive exhibition area of the 2020 China International Fair for Trade in Services (CIFTIS) in Beijing, capital of China, Sept. 8, 2020. Chinese enterprises demonstrated latest innovations and technologies such as 5G and AI at the fair. (Xinhua/Pan Siwei)

China's first major in-person international trade event since the coronavirus outbreak, where 99 innovations were unveiled and 240 agreements were signed, showed the nation's resolve to expand opening-up and push for economic globalization, an official with the Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) said on Wednesday.

The six-day gathering incorporates the nation's prowess in digital technology innovations, which will allow for services trade to expand regardless of the pandemic. It also underscores China's drive to revitalize global trade, which is caught in raging unilateralism and protectionism, according to event participants.

A national negative list for cross-border services trade and a separate list for the nation's free trade zones and free trade ports will be rolled out within this year, Xian Guoyi, head of the Department of Trade in Services and Commercial Services of the MOFCOM, told a media briefing at the conclusion of the China International Fair for Trade in Services (CIFTIS) in Beijing.

China's services trade has ranked No.2 globally for six consecutive years. The event took full advantage of digital technologies to enable business exchanges and negotiations both online and in-person, helping companies explore opportunities to hedge against the impact of COVID-19, Xian said.

Governments at various levels, major centrally administered state-run enterprises and financial firms organized trade groups for the first time at the event to participate in negotiations and procurement, resulting in the signing of 240 agreements, he disclosed.

The amount of contracts of intent signed during the six-day event is still being calculated and will be announced later, Xian said in response to a question from the Global Times after the media briefing.

A total of 22,000 companies and institutions from 148 countries and regions took part in the gathering, including 33 international organizations, 68 embassies in China, 110 overseas business chambers and associations, and 199 Fortune global 500 firms, according to Yan Ligang, head of Beijing's commerce bureau.

Yan said that 5,372 domestic and foreign companies put on online stalls, and 3D stalls accounted for 2,037 of them, while 1,870 projects were unveiled online and 550,000 negotiations were initiated online.

Many health measures were taken to ensure the meeting's effectiveness, Yin Yong, vice mayor of Beijing, told reporters on the sidelines of the CIFTIS on Wednesday -- pre-attendance health checks, nucleic acid tests for exhibitors and volunteers, regular daily disinfection and nucleic acid testing at exhibit halls, and a cap on daily visitor numbers for key halls.

The event's registered participants and visitors exceeded 100,000, according to Xian.

Eager to take advantage of the fair to explore overseas markets, a businesswoman was at a booth of the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO) on Wednesday, asking questions about how her electronics business could venture into the Japanese market.

A number of Chinese businesses asked how to build footprints in Japan, Kazuyuki Karasawa, deputy director of JETRO Beijing, told the Global Times, adding that this year's CIFTIS allowed many Japanese companies, particularly in the elder care area, to showcase their services expertise.

A comprehensive stall for exhibits from Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Panama and Colombia also stood out.

For the fourth time, Joshua Sun, CEO of the China Australia Business Industry Centre Group, was participating in the annual services trade fair, the only major gathering for services businesses where he could seek opportunities.

It was the first time that the three Latin American countries took part in the trade fair, according to Sun. He told the Global Times on Wednesday that the China-Australia row won't deter bilateral business cooperation and the gathering proved to be a platform for talks that might later become actual deals.

The value of deals originating from the services fair during the previous three years has been rising, Sun said.

A key focus of the six-day gathering was the announcement on Friday that the central government will support Beijing city in setting up a pilot international free trade zone for services sector opening, the digital economy and sci-tech innovation.

The creation of the zone "is of particular significance and [will have] a strong demonstration effect," Yin said.

Japanese money broker Ueda Yagi Tanshi Co's currency broking venture, the first fully foreign-owned money brokerage in China, was announced on Wednesday to be set up in Beijing's sub-administrative center.

Daiwa Securities' majority-owned joint venture in China, the first Japanese-invested securities firm to be granted an underwriting and sponsoring license, was also announced Wednesday to be located in Beijing.

The capital city also unveiled an intellectual property trading center on Wednesday that is intended to become a key facility for the nation's sci-tech innovation center and a pivotal hub for international intellectual property cross-border trade.

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China ready to launch global data security initiative

To address new problems and challenges in an increasingly digital era, China is ready to launch a global initiative to safeguard gl.

China ready to launch global data security initiative

To address new problems and challenges in an increasingly digital era, China is ready to launch a global initiative to safeguard global data security that welcomes the participation of all parties, Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi declared China's effort on Tuesday at a seminar on global digital governance.

The initiative comes against the backdrop of Trump administration cooking the so-called data threat from China's high-tech companies in recent months.

The move could be seen as a Chinese response to counter Washington's "Clean Network" program that clearly aims to smear and exclude Chinese technology firms, apps and services providers from some US allies.

Actually, Beijing's move seems more like a Chinese approach on how to properly handle global data security risks.

Data security, which is now under growing regulatory scrutiny, has become a focus of global attention due to the rising geopolitical risks linked to the issue. Over the past months, the Trump administration, without providing any evidence, claimed Chinese high-tech firms and their apps, such as Huawei Technologies, ByteDance's TikTok and Tencent's WeChat, could pose national security risks because of their access to Americans' personal data.

In the digital era, data security threat may be real, but politicizing security issues to use it as a weapon to crack down on other countries' high-tech companies, constitutes a reckless detachment from globally-recognized rules and practices.

Some US politicians may truly believe that suppression of Chinese tech firms by spreading the Cold War mindset to the digital sector will give the US an upper hand, but in fact, it will only undermine investor confidence in the global digital industry. This is because the utilization of data will determine how far we can go in the digital era, and if governments are obsessed with geopolitical games by abusing security issues, it will only lead to isolated islands of data, stalling the progress of the digital age.

But this doesn't necessarily mean that data security is not important, on the contrary, the fast development in global digitalization could only be achieved under the guarantee of data security.

China's latest initiative calls for an objective and rational approach to data security, which is essential for restoring confidence in global digital sector. For instance, governments should tighten data privacy laws and carry out cooperation over cyber-security issues like encryption. These are the right approaches to better protect each country's data security while avoiding political discrimination toward companies, wherever they are based.

Only with better rules can development be assured, so that countries can also avoid picking sides or being subject to arbitrary suppression from one or two specific governments.

It is also worth noting that even though China calls on the global discussion on data security, it won't set the rules. Because only rules that reflect the will of all countries in the world can be accepted and implemented in the long run.

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