China’s ByteDance mulls sales of Indian TikTok asset to rival start-up Glance

• Financial

ByteDance, the Chinese tech conglomerate, headquartered in Beijing, had been exploring an option to a divestiture of its Indian TikTok operation following stiffer Government ban last year that prohibited the popular short-video app from operating in the world’s second-most populous country where the firm had claimed to have a customer base of 200 million people before hitting with a regulatory stumbling block, a Bloomberg News report published late on Saturday had unveiled citing unnamed sources given the sensitivity of the issue.

On top of that, the Bloomberg News report was also quoted one of the sources familiar with the subject-matter as saying that the Chinese tech unicorn was contemplating a sale of its Indian TikTok asset to a Bengaluru-based rival start-up Glance, owned by a local mobile advertising firm InMobi.

However, InMobi also owns a short-video sharing app named Roposo that reportedly had managed to grab a larger slice of market share after a stiffer Government ban on Chinese companies in India that followed a territorial dispute over a North-Western Himalayan Indo-China border in July last year.

Nonetheless, the Bloomberg News report also added that a sale of ByteDance’s Indian TikTok assets to SoftBank-backed Glance, would likely to be highly complicated and might subject to regulatory approvals.

Glance-parent InMobi in talks to purchase ByteDance’s Indian TikTok assets

Apart from that, adding that the discussions over a potential divestiture of ByteDance’s Indian TikTok asset would be confidential, the Bloomberg News report had also added that the Japanese tech investment conglomerate SoftBank Corp., has been a backer of both InMobi and ByteDance, which might ease off the divestiture proceedings.

As a matter of fact, latest Bloomberg News report citing a potential sale of ByteDance’s Indian TikTok unit came forth a month after ByteDance had laid off more than 2,000 people from its Indian workforce, while the Beijing-based tech unicorn had also said in a company memo that it had been unsure on whether it would be able to resume operations in India.