Surinjana Tiwari

Hi there.

That's right.

This is something that we've been hearing about for quite some time now.

And finally, we have confirmation from TikTok that TikTok will sell part of its business to a mixture of firms, and they include Oracle, Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi-based MGX.

Now, ByteDance is a Chinese company.

It's headquartered here in Singapore, where I am.

I'm right outside its headquarters.

It's also headquartered in Los Angeles.

But this almost completely

closes an issue over the app's US operations for quite some time now, now that we have this deal.

And it feels like the company and the app will be able to move forward because if they did not divest their US operations, they did face a ban under US law.

Crucially, ByteDance will only have the 20% stake, whereas the group of investors will have the majority stake.

And, you know, this has become a trade issue between the US and China, largely because lots of US lawmakers, even Trump himself, have raised national security concerns about TikTok.

They ask whether the Chinese government can access US user data from the app and whether the Chinese government can perhaps manipulate feeds

by accessing that user data.

That's something that ByteDance and TikTok have always denied.

But the feeling was, and actually the law stated, that the US operations did have to change ownership in order to continue operating there.

There's still a lot of questions around how this deal will even work.

I mean, one of the biggest sticking points is the algorithm, that really valuable bit of technology.

Now, earlier in the year, we heard from trade officials between the US and China.