The Trump administration is debating the scope and effective date of its bans on Chinese social media apps WeChat and TikTok and the decisions will be made public in the Federal Register around September 20, Bloomberg reported Wednesday citing people familiar with the matter.
The Commerce Department, which will implement the bans, is drafting documents to clarify the specific transactions that will be prohibited between the companies and US businesses and when those prohibitions will take effect, the people said.
Details on how the ban on Tencent WeChat will work are key to the bottom line of US companies that do business with the Chinese company.
At stake is whether the restrictions, which US President Trump first announced August 6, will apply just to US transactions or also extend to operations globally, which could cut into sales across a wide swath of American businesses, the report said.
The September 20 date comes at the end of the 45-day time frame laid out in that initial order.
According to a Weibo survey, 95 percent of 1.2 million people said they would switch to an Android phone rather than give up WeChat if it were banned on the iPhone.
95% of Chinese users would rather give up their iPhone than WeChat, survey shows
WeChat has more than 1.2 billion monthly active users, most of them from China.
Apple, Ford, Walmart, and Disney are among the many US companies that have been trying to convince the Trump administration not to ban WeChat.
More than a dozen US companies raised concerns in phone calls with White House officials on Tuesday, and Apple was included.
Tianfeng International analyst Ming-Chi Kuo noted rencently that global iPhone shipments could drop by 25 to 30 percent if Apple is forced to remove WeChat from its global app store.
However, if WeChat is removed from the US App Store alone, iPhone sales could fall by only 3 to 6 percent, Kuo said.
Ming-Chi Kuo: US WeChat ban could cause iPhone shipments to fall by up to 30%
