Connect with us

Published

on

TikTok logo is displayed on the smartphone while standing on the U.S. flag in this illustration picture taken, November 8, 2019.

Dado Ruvic | Reuters

Investors in Meta, Snap and other U.S. digital media companies have been looking for signs of a rebound after a tumultuous 2022. They got some unexpectedly optimistic news this week.

The U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday voted to advance legislation that would give President Joe Biden the authority to ban TikTok, the viral video app owned by China’s ByteDance that’s been swiping market share from social media stalwarts.

Meta climbed 1% on Wednesday, and Snap was unchanged.

“Implications are great for anybody that has been losing market share to TikTok,” said Laura Martin, an analyst at Needham, in an interview. She said Snap, Meta’s Facebook and Google’s YouTube could be “huge beneficiaries” if the ban ultimately takes place.

TikTok has been on a meteoric rise in the U.S., and its impact was particularly noticeable in 2022, as a sputtering economy pulled down the online ad market.

In 2021, TikTok topped a billion monthly users. An August Pew Research Center survey found that 67% of teens in the U.S. use TikTok, and 16% said they are on it almost constantly. According to Insider Intelligence, TikTok controls 2.3% of the worldwide digital ad market, putting it behind only Google (including YouTube), Facebook (including Instagram), Amazon and Alibaba.

But data privacy concerns have been growing with TikTok because of its parent company, which is based in China and privately held. Congress banned TikTok from government devices as part of a bipartisan spending bill in December, several governors have removed the app from state computer networks —including at public universities — and Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., renewed calls for a complete nationwide ban in January.

China doesn't care about your privacy, says ZeroFox CEO James Foster

“A U.S. ban on TikTok is a ban on the export of American culture and values to the billion-plus people who use our service worldwide,” a TikTok spokesperson said Wednesday. “We’re disappointed to see this rushed piece of legislation move forward, despite its considerable negative impact on the free speech rights of millions of Americans who use and love TikTok.”

Even with the legislation that came before the committee this week, lawmakers have a long way to go before any real ban could be implemented. Assuming this bill gets through the Republican-controlled House, the Democratic majority Senate would have to pass some version of it, which will be a challenge based on the opposition that has already been voiced by some Democrats. If it did pass the Senate, Biden would still need to decide whether to veto it or sign it.

TikTok is no stranger to challenges from U.S. officials, as former President Donald Trump declared his intention to ban the app by executive action in 2020.

ByteDance looked to potentially spin off TikTok to keep the app from being shut down, and the company forged an agreement with Trump that was to include partnerships with Oracle and Walmart, which would both become investors in TikTok.

Those deals fizzled, but Martin said it’s possible that the app could be successfully acquired this time. In that case, TikTok might be a weakened competitor and experience a period of uncertainty, but “it wouldn’t just disappear and get shut down,” Martin said.

Andrew Boone, an analyst at JMP, said Meta likely stands to benefit the most should TikTok face a U.S. ban. Facebook has been pumping money into its TikTok rival, Reels, which has yet to establish a revenue model that’s as effective as the core newsfeed.

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., left, arrives at federal court in San Jose, California, US, on Tuesday, Dec. 20, 2022. 

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Meta said during its fourth-quarter earnings call that it expects Reels to become revenue neutral by the end of the year or in early 2024. Video plays on Facebook and Instagram more than doubled within the past year.

“If TikTok were to go away, I think that there would be a lot more consumption of Instagram Reels,” Boone said in an interview. He said Snapchat’s Spotlight, introduced in 2020, and YouTube Shorts, which came out in 2021, “would also benefit.”

All three platforms had a rough 2022. Meta shares lost two-thirds of their value as the company experienced three consecutive quarters of declining revenue. Snap’s stock plummeted 81% as growth dipped into the single digits, and the company opted not to provide a forecast for two straight periods. YouTube advertising revenue fell short of analyst expectations in the fourth quarter, dropping 8% from a year earlier.

The rush to copy TikTok hasn’t gone over well in many circles.

In July, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri shared a video explaining changes to the social media platform after celebrities like Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian criticized the app for “trying to be TikTok.”

A post urging the company to “make Instagram Instagram again” amassed more than 1.6 million likes and resulted in nearly 140,000 petition signatures. A month later, Mosseri announced his plans to move from San Francisco to London to help Meta lure users away from TikTok.

— CNBC’s Christina Wilkie, Lauren Feiner and Jonathan Vanian contributed to this report

WATCH: TikTok possibly being banned

TikTok possibly being banned

Continue Reading

Technology

U.S. lifts chip software curbs on China amid trade truce, Synopsys says

Published

on

By

U.S. lifts chip software curbs on China amid trade truce, Synopsys says

Synopsys logo is seen displayed on a smartphone with the flag of China in the background.

Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

The U.S. government has rescinded its export restrictions on chip design software to China, U.S.-based Synopsys announced Thursday. 

“Synopsys is working to restore access to the recently restricted products in China,” it said in a statement

The U.S. had reportedly told several chip design software companies, including Synopsys, in May that they were required to obtain licenses before exporting goods, such as software and chemicals for semiconductors, to China. 

The U.S. Commerce Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC.

The news comes after China signaled last week that they are making progress on a trade truce with the U.S. and confirmed conditional agreements to resume some exchanges of rare earths and advanced technology.

Continue Reading

Technology

Datadog stock jumps 10% on tech company’s inclusion in S&P 500 index

Published

on

By

Datadog stock jumps 10% on tech company’s inclusion in S&P 500 index

The Datadog stand is being displayed on day one of the AWS Summit Seoul 2024 at the COEX Convention and Exhibition Center in Seoul, South Korea, on May 16, 2024.

Chris Jung | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Datadog shares were up 10% in extended trading on Wednesday after S&P Global said the monitoring software provider will replace Juniper Networks in the S&P 500 U.S. stock index.

S&P Global is making the change effective before the beginning of trading on July 9, according to a statement.

Computer server maker Hewlett Packard Enterprise, also a constituent of the index, said earlier on Wednesday that it had completed its acquisition of Juniper, which makes data center networking hardware. HPE disclosed in a filing that it paid $13.4 billion to Juniper shareholders.

Over the weekend, the two companies reached a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department, which had sued in opposition to the deal. As part of the settlement, HPE agreed to divest its global Instant On campus and branch business.

While tech already makes up an outsized portion of the S&P 500, the index has has been continuously lifting its exposure as the industry expands into more areas of society.

DoorDash was the latest tech company to join during the last rebalancing in March. Cloud software vendor Workday was added in December, and that was preceded earlier in 2024 with the additions of Palantir, Dell, CrowdStrike, GoDaddy and Super Micro Computer.

Stocks often rally when they’re added to a major index, as fund managers need to rebalance their portfolios to reflect the changes.

New York-based Datadog went public in 2019. The company generated $24.6 million in net income on $761.6 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2025, according to a statement. Competitors include Cisco, which bought Splunk last year, as well as Elastic and cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon and Microsoft.

Datadog has underperformed the broader tech sector so far this year. The stock was down 5.5% as of Wednesday’s close, while the Nasdaq was up 5.6%. Still, with a market cap of $46.6 billion, Datadog’s valuation is significantly higher than the median for that index.

— CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this report.

CNBC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on the cloud computing outlook

Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on the cloud computing outlook

Continue Reading

Technology

Ether and related stocks gain amid the latest crypto craze: Tokenization

Published

on

By

Ether and related stocks gain amid the latest crypto craze: Tokenization

A representation of cryptocurrency Ethereum is placed on a PC motherboard in this illustration taken on June 16, 2023.

Dado Ruvic | Reuters

Stocks tied to the price of ether, better known as ETH, were higher on Wednesday, reflecting renewed enthusiasm for the crypto asset amid a surge of interest in stablecoins and tokenization.

BitMine Immersion Technologies, a bitcoin miner that announced plans this week to make ETH its primary treasury reserve asset, jumped about 20%. It’s gained more than 1,000% since the announcement. Betting platform SharpLink Gaming, which has also initiated an ETH treasury strategy, added more than 11%. Bit Digital, which last week exited bitcoin mining to focus on its ETH treasury and staking plans, jumped more than 6%.

“We’re finally at the point where real use cases are emerging, and stablecoins have been the first version of that at scale but they’re going to open the door to a much bigger story around tokenizing other assets and using digital assets in new ways,” Devin Ryan, head of financial technology research at Citizens.

On Tuesday, as bitcoin ETFs snapped a 15-day streak of inflows, ether ETFs saw $40 million in inflows led by BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust. ETH ETFs came back to life in June after much concern that they were becoming zombie funds.

The price of the coin itself was last higher by 5%, according to Coin Metrics, though it’s still down 24% this year.

Ethereum has been struggling with an identity crisis fueled by uncertainty about the network’s value proposition, weaker revenue since its last big technical upgrade and increasing competition from Solana. Market volatility, driven by geopolitical uncertainty this year, has not helped.

The Ethereum network’s smart contracts capability makes it a prominent platform for the tokenization of traditional assets, which includes U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins. Fundstrat’s Tom Lee this week called Ethereum “the backbone and architecture” of stablecoins. Both Tether (USDT) and Circle‘s USD Coin (USDC) are issued on the network.

Fundstrat's Tom Lee on being named chairman of BitMine Immersion Technologies

BlackRock’s tokenized money market fund (known as BUIDL, which stands for USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund) also launched on Ethereum last year before expanding to other blockchain networks.

Tokenization is the process of issuing digital representations on a blockchain network of publicly traded securities, real world assets or any other form of value. Holders of tokenized assets don’t have outright ownership of the assets themselves.

The latest wave of interest in ETH-related assets follows an announcement by Robinhood this week that it will enable trading of tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs across Europe, after a groundswell of interest in stablecoins throughout June following Circle’s IPO and the Senate passage of its proposed stablecoin bill, the GENIUS Act.

Ether, which turns 10 years old at the end of July, is sitting about 75% off its all-time high.

Don’t miss these cryptocurrency insights from CNBC Pro:

Continue Reading

Trending