After months of remaining hopeful for a return to India, TikTok's Chinese parent ByteDance is considering selling off its India assets to Bengaluru-headquartered mobile content platform –Glance Digital Experience, Bloomberg reported on Saturday citing anonymous sources.
With over 500 million users, India was TikTok's largest market outside China and ByteDance is reportedly in the initial phase of negotiations with Indian firm Glance – that had launched a TikTok-like video making app called Roposo last year.
Japan's SoftBank is also a major part of the discussions as it backs both Glance's parent InMobi Pte as well as ByteDance.
While TikTok's business is struggling in India, Glance has managed to raise $145 million from Google as well as investment firm Mithril Capital led by German-American billionaire Peter Thiel.
At present, none of the brands reportedly involved in the aforementioned negotiations have addressed the subject publicly.
The report on ByteDance acting to get rid of TikTok's stagnant India business comes just roughly a month after it officially announced the downsizing of its employees in the country. The Chinese firm had already frozen the hiring processes in India last year.
ByteDance's India head office is located in Gurugram near Delhi and the firm had a sizable staff of over 2,000 employees in the country.
After India banned TikTok, ByteDance reportedly considered refreshing TikTok's corporate structure and thought about making it an individual unit with a new official headquarters away from Beijing. No development on that front, however, has been made public.
Before Glance, ByteDance had also discussed the possibility of selling TikTok's $3 billion worth of business in India to billionaire Mukesh Ambani-led telecom giant Reliance Jio. That deal did not go through for undisclosed reasons.