Sources: ByteDance is exploring a sale of India operations of TikTok to rival unicorn Glance, in talks initiated by SoftBank, a backer of Glance's parent InMobi
- TikTok banned in India amid poor relations with China — Talks are early and complex, according to people familiar
Context & Ripple Effects
TikTok's India business has been stranded since the June 2020 ban amid strained China-India relations, and this is the latest turn in a long salvage effort: ByteDance previously explored an investment from Reliance for the India operations (talks that began weeks after the ban), while SoftBank separately worked on assembling a bidder group around local partners like Jio and Airtel. The new wrinkle is who is driving and buying: SoftBank initiated these talks and backs InMobi, parent of rival short-video player Glance.
A sale to Glance would hand ByteDance's frozen Indian audience to a domestic competitor rather than a neutral investor — and it rhymes with ByteDance's parallel effort in the US, where it has spent months negotiating structures short of a full sale (the Washington track) and later weighed selling a majority US stake without its recommendation algorithm.
First-order effects
- Glance would gain a shortcut to TikTok's former Indian user base by acquiring its operations outright, consolidating the local short-video market under an InMobi-owned champion.
- ByteDance converts a revenue-less, banned asset into cash and political goodwill, ending months of carrying costs on operations it cannot legally run.
Second-order effects
- SoftBank emerges as the dealmaker across both sides of the table — a Glance/InMobi investor brokering a sale of a portfolio company's asset — concentrating influence over how Chinese-owned apps exit restricted markets.
- Other bidders from the earlier consortium discussions, such as Reliance-linked parties, face being cut out of a process now steered toward a single preferred buyer.
Third-order effects
- If the Glance structure holds, divestiture-to-local-rival becomes the standard playbook for foreign consumer apps caught in geopolitical bans, with sovereign investors like SoftBank arbitraging both the distressed asset and the acquirer.
- India's ban regime effectively forces ownership localization of consumer internet assets, setting a precedent other governments weighing similar restrictions can follow — as ByteDance's separate US majority-stake scenarios already suggest.
The trend: Geopolitical app bans are turning ByteDance's national operations into forced-sale assets, with local rivals and their financial backers capturing them market by market.