TikTok owner ByteDance declines Microsoft’s offer

Microsoft claims it doesn’t buy parts of TikTok ‘s activities, after TikTok owner ByteDance declined its offer. Microsoft eventually struggled in its efforts to purchase TikTok following weeks of negotiations and very public back and forths concerning Trump administration. 

“ByteDance let us know today that they will not sell US operations of TikTok to Microsoft. We are sure that our plan, while maintaining national security interests, would have been beneficial for the short video app users. To do this, we must have made major improvements to ensure that the service meets the highest expectations in terms of reliability, privacy, cyber protection and the battle against misinformation and we made these principles clear on that”, says Microsoft official. 

Microsoft initially announced last month that it was negotiating a deal to acquire TikTok’s US, Australian, Canadian and New Zealand operations. Reports also indicated Microsoft might consider purchasing all of the global operations of TikTok. Enterprise provider Oracle is said to have won the bidding war for TikTok ‘s U.S. operations, a chase from earlier today in which Microsoft has been booting. 

The Wall Street Journal reports that Oracle, an unusual ally of the Silicon Valley Trump administration, will be named as the “trusted engineering partner” for the app in the US. The Article also quotes a source familiar with the matter as saying that the transaction is “possibly not organised as an outright sale. Oracle’s been more oppositional to China than Microsoft.

With this continuing thsi short video app saga, nothing has been straightforward so it’s fair to expect some more twists and turns in the days and weeks ahead. Asia-Pacific shares and futures related to US tech stocks rose Monday as news from Oracle’s TikTok contract boosted expectations of a flashpoint settlement in Washington-Beijing relations. Let’s see how this relation goes between the two big firms.