The sale of the video app’s U.S. operations is entering its final stages, with two groups have submitted bids.
The race to buy TikTok’s U.S. operations has entered its final stages; with two groups submitting bids for the video app, said three people involved in the deal talks. One of the bids was from Microsoft and Walmart; which have teamed up, and the other was from Oracle and could include a coalition of investors, they said.
The discussions remain fluid; It is unclear which group will secure a deal, and the makeup of the bidders could still change.
But TikTok’s owner, the Chinese internet company ByteDance; will most likely make a decision on the competing bids in the coming days, they said. And whichever bid is selected is likely to set TikTok’s U.S. business down very different paths.
A deal with Microsoft and Walmart could draw on Walmart’s digital sales background to turn TikTok into a kind of e-commerce app for both creators and users; That could make TikTok more like Douyin, ByteDance’s TikTok-like Chinese-language video app, which already has e-commerce integrated into it.
A deal with Oracle, the enterprise software company, would be more of a data play. Oracle could use TikTok’s data about social interactions to benefit its cloud, data and advertising businesses, the people said.
Representatives for TikTok, Microsoft and Oracle declined to comment. In a statement, Walmart confirmed it was participating in the discussions and said; “We are confident that a Walmart and Microsoft partnership would meet both the expectations of U.S. TikTok users while satisfying the concerns of U.S. government regulators.”