On June 1, according to the report of India's economic times, a number of people familiar with the matter disclosed that byte beat is seeking cooperation with local enterprises to return to the Indian market** According to sources, byte beat has held preliminary discussions with Indian real estate group Hiranandani.
Hiranandani group is one of the largest real estate developers in India. Yotta infrastructure solutions, its subsidiary, operates the data center and recently launched tez platforms, a technology consumption service platform.
Screenshot of India's economic times report
According to the source, the cooperation between the two sides may be through tez platforms, a consumer service platform, or storing data in the yotta infrastructure data center of the group. It is reported that the scale of data center operated by yotta infrastructure in new Mumbai is the second in the world and the first in Asia.
Regarding the cooperation, a senior Indian government official said, "at present, neither of the two companies has officially communicated with the government, but we have heard of this news. When they apply for government approval, we will check it.".
Another official familiar with the matter said that one of the main reasons why Chinese applications were blocked in 2020 was that the locations where these companies stored and processed user data were not clear enough.
He said that key user data should not be stored outside India. All websites and applications must indicate in the terms that the data is stored only in India, or adjust their data storage and processing policies. If tiktok wants to return to the Indian market, it must follow this guideline. However, the report said that tiktok had already announced its plan for the Indian data center before the ban.
Another senior industry official told the economic times that Hiranandani group has held "exploratory discussions" with several companies, including byte skipping.
Tiktok representative told the economic times that the company hopes to "establish contact" with Indian users again, but currently there is no plan to resume operations in India.
The two companies did not respond to the details of recruiting employees in India and cooperating with Hiranandani group.
It is reported that tiktok executives who had left the company recently returned. Gautam Vohra left his post in August 2021 and recently rejoined bytehop as legal director of South Asia and consultant of the Middle East; Sameer (SAM) Singh was previously responsible for the commercialization of tiktok's Indian market. At present, he is the head of global commercialization solutions in the Asia Pacific region and will mainly promote tiktok's return to India.
On june29,2020, the Indian government permanently banned 59 Chinese applications, including tiktok, on the grounds of security threats. The Indian government said that these applications are suspected of transmitting Indian user data overseas, but until now, there is no conclusive evidence that tiktok and other applications have violated the rules of disclosing user data.
After tiktok was banned, byte beating also stopped other Indian businesses, including snapsolve, an educational application, and helo, a content aggregation application. Seven months after the ban was issued, bytek said in a statement that the company had no choice but to "reduce" the size of its employees in India.
India was once the largest market of tiktok. Before being banned, there were nearly 200million local users and more than 2000 employees. Coincidentally, instagram reels, a short video application launched by American technology giant meta to compete with tiktok, happened to be the first to be tested and promoted in India. At present, the two sides face fierce competition in the global market.