Chinese-owned TikTok will invest more than $1.5 billion and take a majority stake in Tokopedia, the Indonesian superapp GoTo’s e-commerce unit, the companies announced on Monday, reports Nikkei Asia. The move provides a lifeline to the globally popular short video app that was hit by a local ban on online shopping sales on social media platforms.
Talks between TikTok, which is owned by China’s ByteDance, and GoTo began after a new Indonesian government regulation in September prohibiting e-commerce on social media.
The government said the move was aimed at protecting offline merchants and marketplaces in Southeast Asia’s largest economy, but it delivered a major blow to TikTok.