ByteDance is in the early stages of talks with Reliance Industries Limited, India's largest private group, which could invest in TikTok's Indian operations, Tech Crunch said Wednesday, citing people with knowledge of the matter.
This is a potential attempt to save the fate of the popular app in TikTok's largest market.
In response, Chinese newspaper thepaper.cn quoted ByteDance as saying that it had no comment on market rumours.
Reliance Industries is the parent company of Indian telecom giant Jio Platforms, owned by India's richest man, Mukesh Ambani.
Ambani is ranked No. 6 in the world on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, with a fortune of about $80.2 billion.
Reliance Industries and ByteDance began conversations late last month, Tech Crunch reported.
ByteDance's TikTok and Helo were among the large number of Chinese mobile apps that were banned by the Indian government in late June, citing security concerns.
Prior to the ban, TikTok had over 200 million users in India and TikTok's Indian business was valued at over $3 billion.
Previously, India had been considered one of the most important markets in the world by ByteDance.
In April 2019, ByteDance announced that it would invest $1 billion in the Indian market over the next three years.
In July of the same year, ByteDance announced that it would set up a data center in India to store Indian user data locally.
Previously, to comply with Indian legal requirements, Indian users' data was stored in industry-leading third-party data centers in the United States and Singapore.
Publicly available information indicates that ByteDance already employs over 2,000 full-time local employees in India.
According to Sensor Tower, a mobile app analytics company, TikTok had 112 million downloads in May this year, 20% of which came from India, twice as many as the US market.
After its products were banned in India, some reports said ByteDance had invested more than $1 billion in India over the past few years, and now almost all of its products have collapsed in the Indian market, resulting in losses of more than $6 billion.
A deal with Reliance Industries might help ByteDance ease concerns from the Indian government.
Tech Crunch said the investment in TikTok would help Reliance Industries, which has businesses in petrochemicals, retail and telecoms, get closer to consumers.
