A report to the U.S. Congress shows that Beijing Byte Jumping Technology, which operates TikTok (the international version of ShakeYin), will spend 10 times as much on lobbying in 2020 as it did in 2019, amounting to $2.61 million. Alibaba Group’s lobbying fees also increased by 20% to $3.16 million, while another Internet giant, Tencent, also spent $1.52 million.
The Nikkei Chinese website cited statistics from the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) that Chinese communications equipment maker huawei‘s U.S. lobbying expenses in 2020 are more than 80% less than in 2019. However, “Beijing Byte Jump Technology,” Alibaba and Tencent, both have high levels of lobbying expenses in the U.S.
In the United States, it is common to hire professional lobbyists to explain their business to lawmakers and senior government officials and promote policies that benefit them. The report to the U.S. Congress also noted that Facebook’s 2020 lobbying expenditures to U.S. political visitors increased 18 percent from the previous year to $19.68 million, ranking first among private companies for the first Time. Including Alphabet (Google Holdings) and Apple, the combined lobbying spending of the four largest U.S. IT companies increased slightly from the previous year to $53.9 million.
At the same time, Beijing Byte Jumping Technology, which operates TikTok (the international version of ShakeYin), plans to significantly reduce its operations in India, in principle laying off more than 2,000 local employees. The Indian government has been banning apps like TikTok for national security reasons for seven months, and there has been no timetable for restarting them. For ByteTok, India is the second major market after China, which had well over 100 million users, and analysis says the Indian ban has had a huge impact on ByteTok.
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