TikTok is shaking up its e-commerce operations in a move that gives more power to leaders from China and Singapore.
The changes impact its global governance and experience team and will shape the development of new markets like Latin America, according to a memo sent to staff on Friday, which Business Insider viewed.
Global leaders, not local managers, will now oversee tasks like moderation and partner management, per the memo sent by department head Yue Chen.
The move arrives as TikTok is expanding into Brazil.
“It’s fascinating that they’re trying to set up a country/region with leadership that’s not local,” one TikTok staffer said of the LATAM reorganization.
The reorg comes alongside a round of layoffs in the US’s governance and experience team, which goes by GNE for short. The group handles tasks like protecting intellectual property, managing seller compliance, and guarding marketplace safety for TikTok Shop users and creators.
It also follows a series of changes within TikTok’s US e-commerce team, which has been facing growing pressure from top leaders who expressed displeasure with the country’s 2024 performance.
TikTok began expanding in Latin America — a key region for e-commerce growth — earlier this year with a February launch in Mexico. It’s beginning to roll out the product to partners in Brazil this month with plans to start serving e-commerce videos to users in May, according to two people familiar with the matter.
As with the US, the company recruited talent with local expertise to help launch in the region. But in the wake of the GNE reorg, that team will largely be overseen by global leaders, per the memo. Singapore-based global moderation services executive Lin Lin will now focus on the Latin America business, for example. Jiechen Zhao, a China-based executive who worked on governance for TikTok’s global selling team, will oversee GNE partner management and global selling moderation. Sonny Chen, another global executive based in China, is set to head up moderation enablement.
TikTok did not respond to requests for comment.
TikTok is pushing into Latin America amid US political uncertainty
The restructuring arrives as a moment of transition for TikTok’s broader e-commerce team in the Americas.
Company insiders previously told BI that Chinese leaders have been tightening their grip over the US business after a string of departures from local managers like Sandie Hawkins, TikTok’s former GM of US e-commerce, and Mary Hubbard, the company’s former head of GNE in the Americas.
This month’s restructuring of the GNE team shows the company may be following a similar pattern as it enters new regions, two company employees told BI.
The shifts in oversight of the business may stem from a sense among ByteDance leadership that Shop is not performing up to snuff in the Americas. Bob Kang, the head of e-commerce at TikTok and parent company ByteDance, told staff in a February all-hands call that the US team had not met its targets in 2024. The company doled out low scores to the country’s e-commerce workers in March performance reviews, leading to performance-improvement plans and exits.
The future of TikTok in the US is uncertain due to a 2024 law that required its owner, ByteDance, to divest from its US app. The company said it has had discussions with the US government around a political resolution. A potential deal is caught up in a wider US-China trade war.
Latin America presents a big growth opportunity for the company if it can successfully get its e-commerce business off the ground there. E-commerce spending in the region could cross $250 billion by 2028, driven largely by consumer sales in Mexico and Brazil, according to an EMARKETER forecast from September.
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