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Chew, based in Singapore, will retain close ties to TikTok's
Chinese owner ByteDance where he will remain Chief Financial
Officer.
"We will continue building out our strong and deep management
team as we set the stage for the next phase of TikTok's
success," Chew said in a statement.
TikTok's interim head Vanessa Pappas, who led the company on an
interim basis after the abrupt departure of its CEO last year,
Kevin Mayer formerly of Walt Disney Co, will be the new chief
operating officer.
"Shou brings deep knowledge of the company and industry, having
led a team that was among our earliest investors ... He will add
depth to the team, focusing on areas including corporate
governance and long-term business initiatives," said Yiming
Zhang, Founder and CEO of ByteDance.
UNDER SCRUTINY
Over the past few years as its app gained popularity in the
United States, TikTok has sought to distance itself from Beijing
after an inquiry into the safety of the personal data it handles
by a national security panel, the Committee on Foreign
Investment in the United States (CFIUS), Reuters reported in
2019.
“If the goal is to separate TikTok from Bytedance control,
appointing the current Bytedance CFO to concurrently serve as
the TikTok CEO seems to run counter to that,” said Steven
Klemencic, consulting firm BRG’s CFIUS leader and former
intelligence officer who worked in direct support of CFIUS.
Nova Daly, senior advisor at law firm Wiley Rein, who ran the
CFIUS process at the U.S. Treasury Department, said congress
members may object to the appointment. "I think the push back
will be political and from the Hill," he said.
However, some CFIUS lawyers played down any major impact this
restructuring will have on the CFIUS review, noting that TikTok
is still firmly controlled by ByteDance.
Former U.S. president Donald Trump’s administration, which
alleged that TikTok posed a national security threat as China's
government might be able to obtain personal data of the app's
U.S. users. TikTok denied the accusations.
A U.S. plan to sell TikTok's American operations to a U.S.
consortium has languished since late last year, as ByteDance
launched successful legal challenges.
CFIUS has been reviewing the deal to sell TikTok US to a
consortium including Oracle Corp and Walmart Inc., according to
a source familiar with the matter. Details of the discussions
could not be learned.
TikTok has made moves to shift power from Beijing, where
ByteDance is based, to the United States, one of its most
important and fast growing markets.
Alex Zhu, former TikTok head, a Chinese national, had left the
role as the company faced scrutiny over data privacy in 2020.
Zhu is co-founder of the Musical.ly app that ByteDance acquired
for up to $1 billion and re-branded as TikTok.
TikTok poached Disney’s Mayer as CEO last year. Mayer resigned
shortly after his tenure with the Chinese company at the height
of the national security review.
Last year, TikTok ramped up its engineering and moderation team
in Mountain View, California, trying to base these
data-sensitive positions outside of China. The company had
previously said the personal data of millions of U.S. users are
stored in Virginia, with backups in Singapore.
Chew attended college in London, and has an MBA from Harvard.
From 2015 to 2020, he served as Xiaomi’s chief financial
officer, and ran its international business for a year.
(Reporting by Echo Wang; editing by Kenneth Li, Chizu Nomiyama
and David Gregorio)
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