.
Claure believes that Wal-Mart is a purely American company, and Google’s cloud computing infrastructure can also help. SoftBank has invested in many young technology companies including Uber and WeWork in recent years.
The consortium initially planned to let Wal-Mart act as the main acquirer and SoftBank and Alphabet to acquire a minority stake in TikTok. There are two or three other companies participating together and are expected to obtain a minority stake in TikTok.
People familiar with the matter said that Wal-Mart hopes to become TikTok’s exclusive e-commerce and payment service provider and obtain data from the company. However, the US government hopes that TikTok’s main acquirer is a technology company, because this will make their logic of TikTok’s impact on US national security more justifiable-the United States is using this excuse to force ByteDance to divest its US business.
Wal-Mart confirmed its cooperation with Microsoft on Thursday and issued a statement saying it is interested in TikTok’s e-commerce and advertising capabilities.
“We believe that establishing a relationship with Microsoft and TikTok’s U.S. business can increase this critical capability for us, provide Walmart with an important way to reach and serve omnichannel customers, and expand our third-party market and advertising business.” Walmart said “We believe that the cooperation between Wal-Mart and Microsoft meets the expectations of TikTok users in the United States and can alleviate the concerns of US government regulators.”
Alphabet owns the YouTube business. If the company acquires TikTok US assets, it may face antitrust issues. People familiar with the matter said that Alphabet’s main interest in TikTok is to turn it into a new cloud computing customer, but they don’t think they should lead the deal.
Because of this, the consortium led by SoftBank was dissolved last week, forcing Wal-Mart to work with Microsoft instead.
People familiar with the matter said TikTok has not yet made a decision between the two major bidders, Microsoft-Wal-Mart and Oracle. The transaction valued TikTok’s US business at between 20 billion and 30 billion U.S. dollars and is expected to be finalized within the next 48 hours.
TikTok, SoftBank and Alpahbet all declined to comment.
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