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While the U.S. sanctions China Tech, TikTok 's competitor Bigo moves servers from Hong Kong.
BIGO Technology, a smaller rival of the battered Chinese appmaker ByteDance, is shifting servers from Hong Kong to Singapore out of the reach of a new national security law at a time when it seeks to emphasize independence from its Chinese parent.
The move, which follows India 's ban on the firm's apps during this year's flare-up of hostilities between New Delhi and Beijing, comes as the United States tightens the scrutiny of Chinese-owned firms in one of its most promising markets.
President Donald Trump said that the United States could put more leverage on China-owned firms by threatening to block ByteDance 's famous TikTok short video service over worries about the security of the personal data it holds.
Bigo, whose equivalent app, Likee, and live streaming app, Bigo Live, compete with TikTok, was not named by the U.S. authorities, but a senior official told Reuters that he hoped "not to be caught in the crossfire."
Unfortunately, sometimes we can't control what other people think, said Mike Ong, Vice President of Government Relations, in an interview with the firm's headquarters in the city state, where it was founded in 2014.
Ong said the company works "totally separately" from JOYY, the U.S.-listed Chinese software business that acquired Bigo for $2.1 billion last year in a transaction. Bigo is the abbreviation for "Until I Get Old."
JOYY's chief executive officer, Chinese citizen David Li, is a co-founder and director of both firms.
Ong, who worked for Singapore's telecommunications regulator before joining Bigo late last year, said that it does not offer services in China and has its own management, personnel and facilities, including data centers.
With Hong Kong 's new national security law giving Beijing authority to require companies to transfer user data, Bigo, like other global tech firms, is moving its servers out of the semi-autonomous city.
There's some apprehension about what's going on in Hong Kong, Ong said. To be secure, we've agreed to make sure we 're transferring them (servers) to Singapore.
Bigo 's biggest data center room is in Singapore, along with other countries where it works, such as Asia , the United States, Europe and the Middle East.
However, following its repeated declarations of independence and Singapore's roots, India, along with some Chinese applications, forbade it in June as violating the "sovereignty and dignity" of the South Asian country after a border conflict with China.
India is one of Bigo's biggest markets and has a nucleus of more than a quarter of its worldwide workforce of 5,000.
Bigo said that she appealed to both Singapore and the Indian Governments for help in this matter. Neither responded immediately to a request for comments.
Singapore is one of the most popular locations for Chinese firms looking to expand overseas, as ethnic Chinese make up the majority of its population and Mandarin is widely spoken.
Yet even here, Bigo 's case exemplifies the rising problems facing companies in a environment of increasingly divided technologies.
The ownership of a corporation is not determined by the location of its offices, but by the vote, said Xiaofeng Wang, Forrester Research Analyst.
Unless countries were to ban policy-based applications, businesses would have limited choices, even though they were independent parents of different labels, she said.
Asked whether the company was looking at listing Bigo, diversifying its ownership or selling its U.S. business, Ong said it was weighing different scenarios, but refused to give details.
As the coronavirus pandemic forces people to stay home, Bigo has become a major growth driver for JOYY parent. Since the beginning of the year, Bigo Live has seen an increase of more than 30 per cent in monthly active users, corresponding to 50 per cent for Likee.
Europe and North America are the fastest growing markets in the company, he said.
