TikTok shrugs off Trump attack with expansion plans

(FASTNEWS | COLOMBO) – TikTok is continuing to expand despite coming under attack from the Trump administration in the US.

The Chinese-owned firm has announced a tie-up with online retailer Shopify to help businesses create video ads to promote their products.

TikTok also plans to take on around 3,000 engineers over the next three years, a spokesman told the BBC.

The popular short-form video app is being forced to sell its US operations to an American company or face a ban.

TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance will hire the engineers mostly in Europe, Canada, the US and Singapore “to support our rapid global growth,” it said.

It currently employs about 1,000 engineers outside of China, with nearly half of them based in California.

Last month, it emerged that ByteDance plans to invest billions of dollars and recruit hundreds of employees in Singapore, which has been selected as its South East Asia headquarters.