Oracle (Redwood City, Calif.) and Walmart (Bentonville, Ark.) may be partnering with Chinese-based ByteDance to create a U.S.-based company to run the social media application TikTok, Retail Dive reports, in order to avoid it being banned in the U.S. President Trump has tentatively approved the deal and the Department of Commerce has delayed the initial ban set for the application by one week which was supposed to start Sunday.
TikTok Global would be the new company, with 12.5 percent owned by Oracle and 7.5 percent owned by Walmart. Through this partnership, the app would meet the U.S. government’s requirement that the company has a majority American ownership. ByteDance would still own roughly 80 percent of the new company, though 40 percent of ByteDance is already owned by U.S.-based investors, also contributing to the majority American ownership.
Oracle would be providing secure cloud computing for TikTok while Walmart would provide fulfillment, e-commerce, payments and other services, according to Retail Dive.