Leaked TikTok memo reveals changes to its e-commerce division that give more power to Chinese and Singaporean leaders

• TikTok is restructuring a division of its global e-commerce team, a company memo said.
• The changes affect its governance and experience team, which recently laid off US staff.
• The reorg gives executives from China and Singapore greater oversight of markets like Latin America.

TikTok is shaking up its e-commerce operations in a move that gives more power to leaders from China and Singapore.

The changes affect its global governance and experience team and will shape the development of new markets such as Latin America, said a memo sent Friday to staff, which Business Insider viewed.

Global leaders, not local managers, will now oversee tasks like moderation and partner management, said the memo, sent by Yue Chen, the head of global moderation.

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 Latin America reorganization.

The reorg comes alongside a round of layoffs in the US's governance and experience team. 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've expressed displeasure with the company's 2024 performance in the country.

TikTok began expanding in Latin America — a key region for e-commerce growth — in February with a 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, two people familiar with the matter said.

As with the US, the company recruited talent with local expertise to help launch in the region. But in the wake of the governance and experience reorg, that team will largely be overseen by global leaders, the memo said. Lin Lin, the Singapore-based global moderation services executive, is now set to focus on the Latin America business, for example. Jiechen Zhao, a China-based executive who worked on governance for TikTok's global selling team, is set to oversee the governance and experience team's 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 had been tightening their grip over the US business after a string of departures from local managers, including Sandie Hawkins, TikTok's former general manager of US e-commerce, and Mary Hubbard, the company's former head of governance and experience in the Americas.

This month's restructuring 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 the leadership at TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, that Shop is not performing up to snuff in the Americas. Bob Kang, the head of e-commerce at TikTok and ByteDance, told staff on 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, which led to performance-improvement plans and exits.

The future of TikTok in the US is uncertain because of a 2024 law that requires ByteDance to divest from its US app. The company said it'd had discussions with the US government around a political resolution. A prospective 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, EMARKETER forecast in September.

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