By Sherry Qin


China's ByteDance said it won't sell its TikTok business, a day after U.S. President Biden signed legislation to force a sale or ban of the popular Chinese-controlled social-video app.

Beijing-based ByteDance, owner of the app with some 170 million U.S. users, said late Thursday that it has no plans to sell TikTok. The company was responding to a report by the Information that it is considering scenarios for selling a majority stake in TikTok's U.S. business without the all-important algorithm it uses to recommend videos to users.

ByteDance posted on Toutiao, a media platform it owns, that foreign-media reports that it is exploring the sale of TikTok "are untrue."

ByteDance didn't immediately respond to a request for further comment.

Under the new law, ByteDance, which has more than a billion users around the world, has up to a year to sell TikTok or face a ban in the U.S., the app's biggest market and a major growth engine.

U.S. lawmakers, who passed the legislation Saturday in the House and late Tuesday in the Senate, have said they are worried about how TikTok could affect national security, including the potential for China to collect intelligence on U.S. users or spread Beijing's favored messages to users regarding sensitive topics such as the Israel-Hamas war.

TikTok has repeatedly said that it has never shared U.S. user data with the Chinese government and would refuse any such requests.

The Wall Street Journal previously reported that Beijing has signaled that it won't allow a forced sale of TikTok, limiting options for the app's owners even as buyers begin lining up to bid for its U.S. operations. One suitor has suggested $20 billion as a starting price for the U.S. business, while executives at ByteDance at one point considered TikTok's global operations to be worth about half of the Chinese company's overall value, which would put it above $100 billion, the Journal has reported.

A key obstacle for a sale of TikTok is its coveted algorithm to recommend personalized videos to users. China has a say in any such sale because officials added content-recommendation algorithms to an export-control list in 2020 when the Trump administration was pushing for a sale of TikTok's U.S. operations.

Selling only the U.S. business would let ByteDance keep most of its app's business, but TikTok Chief Executive Shou Zi Chew said last year that doing so might "break" the app. Part of TikTok's appeal, he said, is that people outside the U.S. can experience Americana.

Chew posted a video after Biden's signing this week telling users that the company would continue efforts to challenge the legislation in court, adding that "we aren't going anywhere."


Write to Sherry Qin at sherry.qin@wsj.com


(END) Dow Jones Newswires

04-26-24 0525ET