Chinese video-sharing app TikTok has chosen a bidder for its US, New Zealand and Australian businesses, and could announce the deal as soon as Tuesday, CNBC reported on Monday, citing people familiar with the situation.
Tech giant Microsoft, in partnership with Walmart, and Oracle are the two top contenders for the deal, which comes amid intense pressure from the Trump administration that the TikTok be sold to a US entity over Washington’s concerns about the data privacy of Americans using the service. The sale price is expected to be in the range of $20 billion to $30 billion, CNBC reported last week.
TikTok's spokesperson told the CNBC earlier this day that the service was not engaged in talks to sell its US business to rival short-video-sharing app Triller.
In early August, US President Donald Trump threatened to ban TikTok by 15 September if it was not sold to a US company, triggering a lawsuit from TikTok owner ByteDance and sparking further diplomatic tensions with China.
The Chinese company said it had taken extraordinary measures to protect the privacy and security of its user data, including having such data stored outside of China - particularly in the United States and Singapore - and erecting software barriers to prevent co-mingling with data from other ByteDance products.