TikTok Strikes Back in Indonesia
Live MintThe Indonesian government executed its crackdown on “social shopping" in the name of protecting local small businesses. The viral short-video platform, owned by China’s Bytedance, agreed to combine its nascent TikTok Shop operations in Indonesia with GoTo’s e-commerce subsidiary Tokopedia on Monday. Indonesia’s largest internet company doesn’t get any upfront cash, since the injection from TikTok will go into the joint venture rather than directly to GoTo. Venugopal Garre, an analyst with Bernstein, reckons that TikTok Shop currently clocks in at just a third of Tokopedia’s gross merchandise value of $15 billion. While the U.S. is an attractive market for TikTok, which has 150 million active users there, Southeast Asia will probably be the more important e-commerce market, at least at the beginning.