The standoff between Washington and Beijing over TikTok seems to be moderating. US President Donald Trump confirmed on Monday August 3 that he had given the Chinese application TikTok, owned by Chinese ByteDance, 45 days to sell its activities in the United States, on pain of banning them.

"It will close on September 15 unless Microsoft or some other company is able to buy it and find a deal," he added.

The US president said he was not opposed to Microsoft buying these activities. The day before, the group founded by Bill Gates officially expressed its interest in this operation.

The US president also said he wanted the US Treasury to get a lot of money through this transaction, without specifying how.

Ongoing negotiations

In a context of political and trade tensions with China, Washington has accused for months the interface of being used by Chinese intelligence for surveillance purposes. TikTok has always firmly denied any data sharing with Beijing.

Friday evening, the tenant of the White House had declared to want to ban the application of sharing of light videos, and to be opposed to its takeover by an American group. But on Sunday, he spoke with Satya Nadella, the boss of the Microsoft group, which is negotiating to buy the American branch of TikTok from its parent company.

After their discussion, the head of the IT group confirmed that it would continue negotiations for an agreement by September 15 at the latest.

This acquisition of the American activities of the very popular video application, which claims 100 million American users, would allow Microsoft to become a serious competitor for the social media giants Facebook and Snap.

The group at odds with CFIUS

For its part, the Chinese group ByteDance has not publicly confirmed the holding of discussions with Microsoft.

But in an internal letter, sent to staff on Monday and which Reuters was able to read, CEO and founder of ByteDance, Zhang Yiming, explains that the company has started discussions with a technology group whose name he did not mention. , in order to clear the way "for us to continue to bring the TikTok app to the United States."

He points out, however, that the Chinese group disagrees with the position of the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States (CFIUS), the federal body which deemed essential a complete divestiture of TikTok's American activities due to threats to national security.

With AFP and Reuters

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