TikTok dismisses remaining staff in India, dashing hopes of banned app’s return
- The ByteDance-owned app, which has been banned in India since June 2020, said it has closed its remote sales support hub in India
- TikTok also faces mounting political backlash in the West, where US lawmakers have reintroduced bipartisan legislation to ban the Chinese app
TikTok, the popular short video app banned in India since 2020, has laid off its roughly 40 remaining workers in the country amid increasing regulatory scrutiny of Chinese tech companies by New Delhi.
“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,” a TikTok representative said on Monday.
“We greatly appreciate these employees and their impact on our company, and will ensure they are supported at this difficult time.”
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The dismissed people, who mostly supported markets outside India such as Dubai and Brazil, have been told that February 28 would be their last day as TikTok believed that restarting its Indian operations would not work “because of the government’s stance on Chinese apps”, according to a report by local newspaper The Economic Times, citing an unnamed source.
TikTok, owned by Beijing-based unicorn ByteDance, has been banned by the Indian government since June 2020 on national security concerns. More than 200 Chinese apps have since been blacklisted, including dozens of betting and lending apps that were blocked last week, after a lethal military clash at the Indian-Chinese border in June 2020.
Before TikTok was banned, India was the app’s largest market by downloads, making up over 18 per cent of the global total in June 2020, compared with the United States’ 8.7 per cent, according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower.
