The CEO of TikTok announced Thursday that he wants to invest “billions of dollars” in Southeast Asia in the coming years, as online sales, launched in the region in 2022 by the Chinese video-sharing group, take off. “We are going to invest billions of dollars in Indonesia and Southeast Asia over the next few years,” Shou Zi Chew told a conference in the Indonesian capital Jakarta. “From a modest team of 100 people, we now have nearly 8,000 employees in Southeast Asia,” said the leader of the group founded six years ago.
The app boasts some 125 million Indonesian users each month, for a total of 325 million in Southeast Asia. In Indonesia, the largest economy in the region, the group has, according to the CEO, more than 2 million sellers in the “TikTok Shop”, where fashion items, high-tech or handmade items are offered for sale. . A study by the Singaporean consulting firm Momentum Works, also published on Thursday, pointed out that the group had been able to take advantage of its success with millions of users in the region to develop its online sales activity in 2022, tested in Indonesia l ‘last year.
While it still ranks behind the region’s e-commerce heavyweights, Shopee and Lazada, TikTok Shop recorded the fastest growth with a volume of business (GMV) multiplied by seven in one year, to $4.4 billion last year, up from $600,000 in 2021. TikTok is controlled by Chinese tech giant ByteDance. The volume of business (GMV), a key indicator of e-commerce, of the nine main online sales platforms in the region reached 100 billion dollars last year, an increase of 14% over one year, drawn by the Singaporean group Shopee and by Lazada, a subsidiary of the Chinese group Alibaba.
