On July 31, the U.S. President Donald Trump said that he will ban TikTok from operating in the U.S. At that time, it was reported that Trump had rejected Microsoft’s plan to acquire TikTok. However, Microsoft held discussions with China-based firm ByteDance on Sunday to acquire TikTok in the U.S. The Redmond company revealed that it aims to finish talks with ByteDance by Sept. 15.
According to CNBC, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has spoken about acquiring TikTok with Trump. Apart from the U.S., the company aims to purchase TikTok in other regions like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. It said that “The operating model for the service would be built to ensure transparency to users as well as appropriate security oversight by governments in these countries.” The current platform offered by TikTok will be powered by Microsoft’s topnotch security, privacy, and digital safety protections.
Reuters reported that Trump has agreed to provided ByteDance with 45 days to discuss on a sale of TikTok to Microsoft. The latter aims to store the user data of TikTok users locally in the U.S. After data migration is successfully carried out, it will delete the data stored at other places.
Initial reports claimed that Microsoft had first only focused on acquiring TikTok’s smaller business in the U.S. However, it is now being reported that Microsoft could be planning to scale the entire company.
Neither Microsoft nor ByteDance revealed the deal terms of the acquisition. CNN reported that Wedbush Securities analyst Daniel Ives believes that TikTok’s value could be hurt significantly it had to stop operating in the U.S. He claimed that the valuation of the TikTok app is around $50 billion.
There is a possibility that the relationship between Microsoft and Facebook may complicate as the latter considers ByteDance as a rival. Microsoft has been working on several initiatives with Facebook since 2007 when the Redmond-based firm invested $240 million in the popular social networking platform.
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