About 40 people are expected to be affected by the closure of the remote sales center, and the company plans to pay nine months’ worth of severance pay to them.
Short-form video platform TikTok, owned by ByteDance, is closing the rest of its India operations, which included a remote sales support team hired in late 2020 to help global and regional sales teams.
“We have taken the decision to close our India remote sales support hub, which was put in place at the end of 2020 to provide support to our global and regional sales teams. We greatly appreciate these employees and their impact on our company and will ensure they are supported at this difficult time,” a TikTok spokesperson said in a statement.
In June 2020, India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) banned TikTok, along with 58 other China-linked apps, on the grounds that the apps posed a threat to national security. After the ban took effect, ByteDance, which at the time had more than 2,000 employees in India, told employees in January 2021 that it would reduce the size of its Indian team while retaining only the key positions.
TikTok is one of the most popular social media apps in India, especially among Gen Z users. At the time of the ban, the app had over 200 million active users in India. At the time, Mint reported that the ban cost India’s top 100 TikTok influencers around Rs 120 crore. Many of the platform’s top influencers and creators are now active on YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and even some Indian short video apps Moj and Josh.
TikTok’s Chinese language links continue to threaten its business in other countries. In 2020, the Trump administration considered banning the app or forcing ByteDance to sell its US operations to an American company. Although the app remains publicly available in the United States, the Biden administration banned the app from all government devices in December.
