Microsoft announced the plan: to buy the fashionable social application TikTok, that owned by the Chinese company Bytedance Ltd, and confirms the long-standing efforts of the technology giant to occupy a niche in the digital advertising market, along with Facebook and Google.
It is known that Microsoft intends to acquire TikTok’s business in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and may invite other US investors to participate in the acquisition. Potential value and conditions are not disclosed.
The current hurdle to a potential deal is that the U.S. Foreign Investment Committee (CFIUS) has been investigating the legality of Bytedance’s acquisition of the Musical.ly app in 2017, which was added to TikTok, since November 2019.
TikTok was launched in the US more than two years ago after the acquisition of Bytedance Musical.ly, combination of functions of the two applications brought TikTok popularity in the United States – the number of downloads has exceeded 165 million, and worldwide the application has already downloaded more than 2 billion users.
After the escalation of the conflict between the US and China, following Washington’s accusations for Beijing in that the Chinese government has done insufficient to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus, rhetoric against Chinese companies has become more severe.
In early July, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated, that the United States is considering banning TikTok, as well as other Chinese social networking applications, referring to national security considerations. Pompeo added that the Trump administration evaluates TikTok like Chinese state-owned enterprises.
Huawei and ZTE, whom he had previously accused of spying for the Chinese government
In an interview with reporters, US President Donald Trump said: “we ban TikTok, in the United States.”
However, Microsoft said in a press that it would continue to work with the US government on the agreement and that the company intends to complete negotiations on the acquisition of TikTok on September 15.
According to Bloomberg, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had a telephone conversation with Trump to gain support for the agreement. In favor of the agreement may contribute to at least two factors – this is the dissatisfaction of millions of American TikTok users (potential Trump voters in the upcoming presidential election in November this year) and creating more competition in the large social market, networks, which essentially consists of Facebook and Twitter.
Fans of Tik Tok and defenders the freedom of speech on the Internet launched a video with the hashtag #ban against the ban on the application, which received more than 620 million views on TikTok.
In addition, Microsoft has promised that TikTok users under company leadership will receive “world-class security, privacy and digital protection”, American`s user data will be stored exclusively in US data centers and will be removed from foreign servers after the migration.
Tik Tok’s management also noted that the company is creating a large number of jobs in the United States.
TikTok has already hired nearly 1,000 people this year and plans to hire another 10,000 people for “high-paying jobs” in the United States, approved in a statement by a company representative.
The company also has created a business support fund in the country worth $ 1 billion.
All this is very serious in terms of promises when the United States is experiencing high unemployment and a record economic decline because of the crisis of pandemic.
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