Walmart joins Microsoft in bid to get TikTok
31 August, 2020
US retail giant Walmart said Thursday it had teamed with Microsoft in a bid to buy Chinese-owned short-form video iphone app TikTok.
“We are confident that a Walmart and Microsoft partnership would meet both expectations folks TikTok users while satisfying the concerns folks government regulators,” the retailer told AFP.
It may seem as an unlikely combination, but Microsoft and Walmart already are business partners. Microsoft provides cloud computing services that help run the retailer’s stores and online shopping. The two companies signed a 5-year partnership in 2018, enabling them to join forces against a shared rival: online shopping giant Amazon
Walmart is likely considering TikTok to better hook up with younger shoppers who turn to the internet for lifestyle trends, according to analysts.
Younger people are much less more likely to shop at Walmart, whether online or in real-world stores, according to GlobalData Retail managing director Neil Saunders.
“A social platform like TikTok would give Walmart easy access to the very audience it wants and must attract,” Saunders said.
Access the social media sensation could help Walmart’s marketing campaigns while tapping into “a rich seam of data” or product development and more, according to Saunders.
Walmart teaming around technology colossus Microsoft was “the final little bit of the puzzle that eventually cements Microsoft successfully acquiring TikTok’s US procedures for likely $35 billion to $40 billion,” according to Wedbush analyst Dan Ives.
‘High stakes poker’
“While deal negotiations will be complex with several technology and data privacy conditions that need to be exercised before an agreement is inked, we believe ByteDance is playing a game of high stakes poker with Microsoft looking just like the only true white knight around,” Ives said in an email to investors.
TikTok CEO Kevin Mayer said Wednesday he previously quit the business as tensions soar between Washington and Beijing over the Chinese-owned video platform.
Mayer’s departure was taken by some on the market as a sign a deal to market TikTok is imminent. Oracle is also reported to be in the bidding
Mayer’s resignation came just days after TikTok filed a lawsuit challenging a crackdown by the US government over claims the wildly popular social media app works extremely well to spy on Americans.
TikTok, which includes been downloaded 175 million times in america and more than a billion times all over the world, argued in the suit that Trump’s order was a misuse of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
The platform-on which users share often playful short-form videos-is not “a unique and extraordinary threat,” it said.
The platform’s kaleidoscopic feeds of clips feature from dance routines and hair-dye tutorials to jokes about daily life and politics.
The business holds firm that it has never provided any US user data to the Chinese government, and Beijing has blasted Trump’s crackdown as political.
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