The CEO of TikTok announced on Thursday that he plans to invest “billions of dollars” in Southeast Asia in the coming years as online sales, which will be launched in the region in 2022 by the Chinese video-sharing group, pick up steam.
“We will invest billions of dollars in Indonesia and Southeast Asia over the next few years,” Shou Zi Chew said at a conference in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta.
“From a modest team of 100 people, we now have almost 8,000 employees in Southeast Asia,” said the head of the group, which was founded six years ago.
The app has around 125 million Indonesian users every month, totaling 325 million in Southeast Asia.
In Indonesia, the region’s largest economy, the group has more than 2 million sellers in the “TikTok Shop” where fashion, high-tech or handmade items are for sale, according to the CEO.
A study by Singaporean consulting firm Momentum Works, also released on Thursday, indicated that the group could capitalize on its success with millions of users in the region to expand its Indonesia-tested online sales operations in 2022. last year.
While still lagging behind the region’s e-commerce heavyweights Shopee and Lazada, TikTok Shop has seen the fastest growth. Volume of business (GMV) grew sevenfold in a year to $4.4 billion last year, compared to $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 top nine online selling platforms in the region reached $100 billion last year, up 14% year-on-year, driven by Singaporean group Shopee and by Lazada, a subsidiary of the Chinese group Alibaba.