US and China reach deal to transfer TikTok ownership, trade official says

"Jamieson Greer, a US trade representative, said on Monday that Washington and Beijing have struck a framework agreement on transferring TikTok to US-controlled ownership. Speaking after emerging from negotiations with Chinese officials, Scott Bessent said the deal was coming but declined to reveal the commercial terms. We have a framework for a TikTok deal, the treasury secretary told reporters after coming out of high-level talks in Madrid. We're not going to talk about the commercial terms of the deal. It's between two private parties, but the commercial terms have been agreed upon."

"The framework agreement is a breakthrough in the long-running dispute over TikTok's ownership, which has raised national security concerns in Washington over the app's Chinese parent company ByteDance. In April 2024, Joe Biden signed legislation that gave ByteDance nine months to sell the platform to a US-approved buyer or face a total ban a deadline that Donald Trump has repeatedly extended. The TikTok ownership saga stretches back to 2020, when Trump first ordered ByteDance to divest TikTok or face a shutdown. Microsoft initially pursued a potential acquisition worth billions of dollars, with CEO Satya Nadella engaging directly with Trump, but it fell apart in what Nadella dubbed at the time the strangest deal he's ever worked on."

Washington and Beijing have agreed on a framework to transfer TikTok to US-controlled ownership, with final approval pending from US and Chinese presidents. Commercial terms between the private parties have been agreed but remain undisclosed. The framework addresses long-running US national security concerns about ByteDance, TikTok's Chinese parent. April 2024 legislation gave ByteDance nine months to sell to a US-approved buyer or face a ban, with the deadline repeatedly extended. Past acquisition talks involved Microsoft, Walmart and Oracle, and Oracle has served as TikTok's US cloud provider since 2022. Final details await an upcoming Trump–Xi discussion.

Read at www.theguardian.com