“We are going to invest billions of dollars in Indonesia and Southeast Asia over the next few years,” Xu Ziqiu told a conference in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta.
“From a modest team of 100 people, we currently have around 8,000 employees in Southeast Asia,” added the president of the group, founded 6 years ago.
About 125 million Indonesians use the app every month, and the total number of monthly users is 325 million in Southeast Asia.
And in Indonesia, the region’s largest economy, the group has, according to the CEO, more than two million sellers in the “Tik Tok Shop”, where items related to fashion, technology and peak. and handicrafts.
A study by Singaporean consultancy Momentum Works, also released on Thursday, says the group has been able to capitalize on its success and garner millions of users in the region to grow its online retail business by the year 2022, which has been tested in Indonesia. Last year.
Although TikTok has not outpaced other major e-commerce apps in the region, such as Shopee and Lazada, the TikTok store has seen the fastest growth, with revenue increasing 7x in one year to reach $4.4 billion last year.
“TikTok, which has an entertainment-seeking audience, is trying in various ways to divert its attention” to e-commerce, Weihan Chen, director of Momentum Works, told AFP.
From Indonesia, the “TikTok Store” has expanded significantly to 5 other markets in Southeast Asia, where a large number of people use TikTok and “have invested to improve its e-commerce capabilities”.
GMV revenue, a leading indicator of e-commerce, across 9 major e-commerce platforms in the region hit $100 billion last year, a 14% year-on-year increase, powered by Shopee .Singapore and the “Lazada” company of the Chinese “Alibaba” group.
Shopee, a subsidiary of Sea Group, reported revenue of 47.9 billion, about half of the regional total, up 13%, according to the study.
Lazada came second, with a sales volume of 20.1 billion, up from 21 billion in 2021.
Indonesia is the largest e-commerce market in the region, accounting for 52% of business volume in Southeast Asia.
Momentum Works expected the sector to continue to grow despite the return of customers frequenting stores after the lifting of Covid-19 restrictions.
Chinese tech giant ByteDance controls TikTok. The app, which posts short videos, has more than a billion users worldwide. It is particularly popular with young people.
But authorities in the United States and many European countries suspect that the app does not sufficiently protect data, allowing Beijing to spy on or even manipulate users. The creators of the app have always denied this.
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