TikTok’s parent company ByteDance is reportedly considering setting up a global headquarters outside China after facing pressure from US authorities to explain how it operates and prove that the company has no ties with the Chinese government.
As per a report by The Wall Street Journal, ByteDance has been exploring the idea of moving headquarters for some time now but efforts to leave China have accelerated in the past few months as it finds itself cornered by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) over the company’s $1 billion acquisition of Musical.ly — which was later re-branded as TikTok.
In October, senators Chuck Schumer and Tom Cotton said the app was an “a potential counterintelligence threat we cannot ignore” and asked the Intelligence Community to investigate. The threat concerns data collection but also the possibility of TikTok censoring content in line with the ethos of the Chinese Communist Party.
TikTok is owned by China’s ByteDance, but the TikTok side of operations (also known as Douyin in China and is a separate legal entity) takes pains to distance itself from China as much as possible with most of its operations being run out of Los Angeles. ByteDance also established an Irish subsidiary, TikTok Technology Ltd, last year and is actively recruiting for a number of roles in Dublin, which also happens to be the site for Facebook’s largest office outside Menlo Park.
Insiders say that possible locations include Singapore, London and Dublin, with no city in the United States currently in the list. As of now, TikTok does not have a separate headquarters, with its top-level executives based in Shanghai. The company currently has around 50,000 employees globally, 400 of them in the US.
“We have been very clear that the best way to compete in markets around the globe is to empower local teams,” a TikTok spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal. “TikTok has steadily built out its management in the countries where it operates.”
