TikTok to spend billions in SE Asia as e-commerce move pays off

JAKARTA: Tik Tok’s chief executive said Thursday the company would pour billions of dollars into Southeast Asia in the coming years, as a report showed its nascent venture into online shopping is paying off.

The popular video-sharing app’s e-commerce affiliate has gained a substantial market share in the region just a year after its launch.

“We’re going to invest billions of dollars in Indonesia and Southeast Asia over the next few years,” Shou Zi Chew told a forum in Indonesian capital Jakarta.

“From a humble team of about 100 people, we now have nearly 8,000 employees in Southeast Asia.”

Chew said 125 million Indonesians comprised the majority of the app’s 325 million Southeast Asian users every month and more than two million sell their wares on TikTok Shop in Indonesia, the region’s biggest economy and most populous nation.

Users sell a range of tech, fashion, homemade products and other goods on the platform.

Chew’s comments came as Singapore-based consultancy Momentum Works released a report Thursday detailing how TikTok Shop capitalised on legions of users to expand its business in 2022 after testing the waters in Indonesia a year earlier.

While it lagged older rivals Shopee and Lazada, TikTok Shop posted the fastest growth rate, expanding its gross merchandise value (GMV) — the total value of goods sold, including cancelled, returned and refunded orders — sevenfold to $4.4 billion last year from just $600,000 in 2021.

“You can think of it as TikTok already having a captive audience coming onboard for entertainment trying different means to convert them and their attention into purchase and GMV,” Weihan Chen, head of insights at Momentum Works, told AFP.