SoftBank Plans to Acquire TikTok India Business

SoftBank is believed to be putting together an association of companies to bid for TikTok's India business and is actively seeking local partners, as Bloomberg reported. SoftBank, already owns a stake in ByteDance, TikTok parent company, it is reportedly in talks with the Reliance Jio, and Bharti Airtel heads. Reliance Jio's name has come forward in several reports for its interest in buying TikTok's India business in India.

Before TikTok was banned in June, India was TikTok's biggest market in terms of the user base, and since then, several domestic clones have been trying to fill the short-video sized place that TikTok left behind it. Even Instagram launched Reels, its TikTok competitor, in a bid to substitute the popular short-video app, which had almost 200 million users in India alone.

It looks like as if Softbank is really interested in buying TikTok. In the US, it was known to have joined hands with Walmart and Alphabet to make a joint bid for TikTok's acquisition. Reportedly this deal would have put Walmart as the lead buyer, with SoftBank and Alphabet acquiring marginal stakes. However, the deal actually fell through because the US administration wanted the TikTok lead buyer to be a technology company so that user data can be stored in the US.

After the TikTok ban in India, the US placed an effective ban on TikTok through an executive order in August and then ordered Bytedance to sell off its American assets within 3 months. Oracle and a group of Walmart and Microsoft have emerged as the likely frontrunners to acquire TikTok's American business. Earlier Microsoft had said that it was interested in buying TikTok's global operations as well.