Tech giant Microsoft is said to be in the process of negotiating to buy the Chinese-dominated video sharing app TikTok, as reports claim. The move comes as the app has come under intense scrutiny by the US government, including threats from President Donald Trump to completely shut down TikTok in America.TikTok has been accused of accumulating user data and sharing them with the Chinese government. However, TikTok has strongly denied the claims. India has already banned TikTok as well as other 58 apps that points towards the origination in mainland China.
The amount, however, has been undisclosed but its speculated that this might overtake Microsoft’s biggest purchase since Nokia, GitHub and LinkedIn.
Microsoft, largest tech company in the US, with over a trillion dollar of net worth value is eying TikTok to step up its game in the trending community and TikTok would be the perfect platform to invest since there is a glooming threat of TikTok taking over major competitors like Instagram and Youtube. The amount, however, has been undisclosed but its speculated that this might overtake Microsoft’s biggest purchase since Nokia, GitHub and LinkedIn. Buying TikTok can improve the company’s performance in the digital advertising market and Microsoft doesn’t want to fall behind.
The New York Times reported that ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, offered to sell its business to US to avoid Trump’s ban. It is rather unclear whether ByteDance is going to sell the whole TikTok business to Microsoft or just the US operations. TikTok has reassured its users who feared the app would disappear, saying “we did not plan to go anywhere” and emphasized that the app was “home to artists and creators”. How will Microsoft play this game is still intriguing to all of us. Microsoft has a huge resource in videos (with skype technologies) and social media (with LinkedIn technologies), therefore there is no doubt that the play is going to be witfully tackled.
