By Echo Wang and Yingzhi Yang
NEW YORK/BEIJING (Reuters) – ByteDance and Oracle Corp issued conflicting statements on Monday over the terms of a deal they agreed with the White House over the weekend, casting doubt over President Donald Trump’s preliminary blessing of the agreement.
China’s ByteDance was racing to avoid a crackdown on TikTok after the U.S. Commerce Department said on Friday it would block new downloads and updates to the app come Sunday. U.S. officials had expressed concern that the personal data of as many as 100 million Americans that use the app was being passed on to China’s Communist Party government.
ByteDance said on Monday that it will own 80% of TikTok Global, a newly created U.S. company that will own most of the app’s operations worldwide. ByteDance added that TikTok Global will become its subsidiary.
Oracle and Walmart, which have agreed to take stakes in TikTok Global of 12.5% and 7.5% respectively, had said on Saturday that majority ownership of TikTok would be in American hands. On Monday, Oracle said ByteDance will have no ownership in TikTok Global.
Trump signed an executive order on Aug. 14 giving ByteDance 90 days to relinquish ownership of TikTok. Oracle’s account of the deal would mean that ByteDance would be complying with that order, while ByteDance’s account would represent a policy reversal for Trump.
The White House referred to a Fox News interview on Monday, in which Trump said that Oracle and Walmart will have “total control” over TikTok.
“If we find that they don’t have total control, then we’re not going to approve the deal,” Trump said.
Some sources close to the deal have sought to reconcile the discrepancies by pointing out that 41% of ByteDance is owned by U.S. investors, so by counting this indirect ownership TikTok Global would be majority owned by U.S. parties. One of the sources said the deal with Oracle and Walmart values TikTok Global at more than $50 billion.
ByteDance on Monday also confirmed plans for an initial public offering of TikTok Global. The Beijing-based firm said TikTok Global’s board of directors will include ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming as well as Walmart’s chief executive Doug McMillon and current directors of ByteDance. The company declined to further comment on who else would be among the directors.
Oracle and Walmart said in a joint statement on Saturday that four out of the five board of directors will be Americans.
The current plan for TikTok Global does not involve any transfer of algorithms or technologies, and Oracle will be able to inspect TikTok U.S.’s source code, ByteDance said. This is akin to U.S. companies such as Microsoft Corp sharing their source code with Chinese technology experts, ByteDance added. Oracle and Walmart have said all of TikTok’s technology will be in possession of TikTok Global.
EDUCATION FUND
ByteDance also said a $5-billion payment of taxes TikTok Global is reportedly supposed to make to the U.S. Treasury is based on estimated income and other taxes the company will need to pay over the next few years, and has nothing to do with the deal reached with Oracle and Walmart.
Trump last week had said there would be a $5-billion U.S. education fund as part of the deal, but ByteDance has said it was not aware of this.
ByteDance owning the majority of TikTok Global and the algorithms means that ByteDance is “not out of the game” and has avoided the worst-case scenario, China’s state-run newspaper Global Times said in an editorial published on Sunday.
Shen Yi, a Fudan University professor, said in a separate article published in the Global Times on Monday that Trump’s nod to the deal “could even been seen as a reversal of U.S. President Donald Trump’s executive order issued in August” and that it was helped by a “concerted effort” by the Chinese government, ByteDance and U.S. domestic forces.
“If the Trump administration makes more moves to block the deal, it may encounter direct checks and balances from interest groups of Wall Street.”
(Reporting by Echo Wang in New York and Yingzhi Yang in Beijing; Additional reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco and Roxanne Liu and Se Young Lee in Beijing; Editing by Christopher Cushing and Nick Zieminski)
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