TikTok has accommodated 5 million businesses in Indonesia, dominated by MSMEs. This output has reinforced the company to continue investing in the country.
Heaptalk, Jakarta — A short video app TikTok, reportedly will invest about US$10 billion (around Rp149 trillion) in Indonesia in the next two to five years. This announcement was directly informed by the CEO of TikTok, Shou Zi Chew, during his meeting with Indonesia’s Minister of Trade, Zulkifli ‘Zulhas’ Hasan (06/14).
“We are going to inject billions of dollars in Indonesia and Southeast Asia over the next few years,” affirmed Shou Zi Chew during a forum organized in Jakarta to highlight the social and economic impact of the app in the region.
Instead of explaining a detailed spending plan breakdown, the company only reveals the platform aims to invest in training, advertising, and supporting small vendors looking to join its e-commerce platform TikTok Shop.
Based on Indonesia’s Ministry of Trade information, TikTok Indonesia recorded transactions of around USD 2 billion each year. Seeing this potential, Chew appreciates the support of the Ministry to provide a permission for the TikTok Shop to operate in the archipelago.
Meanwhile, in Southeast Asia, TikTok facilitated around US$4.4 billion in transactions last year, elevated from US$600 million in 2021. However, as noted in the Momentum Work, this output remained far behind Shopee’s worth US$48 billion of regional merchandise sales in 2022.
CEO Chew also claimed that this short-video platform accommodated 5 million business players in Indonesia, dominated by MSMEs. From the output, around 2 million business players vend their products on the TikTok Shop. He also voiced the content on its platform was becoming more diversified as the platform users expanded their advertisement into e-commerce features.
“TikTok has 124 Monthly Active Users (MAU) in the archipelago, which is a big responsibility. We prioritize security and safety. Therefore, we aim to work with the regulators to ensure that TikTok applications will be safe for Indonesian users,” added Chew.
As it is well known, TikTok‘s investment plan comes as this Chinese-owned company encounters scrutiny from some governments and regulators due to concerns that Beijing could use it to harvest user data or advance its interest.
In response to this investment plan, Zulhas recognized the TikTok platform has become one of the digital platforms that back the local MSMEs trading their goods. He looks forward TikTok platform can boost the priority of local products by bolstering Indonesia’s MSMEs onboarding through training, product curation, and providing promotional space facilities for domestic production.
