Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom and Davis Polk & Wardwell are advising on an e-commerce unit sale by PT GoTo Gojek Tokopedia Tbk to social media platform, TikTok.
As part of the agreement, TikTok, which is owned by parent company ByteDance Ltd. founded by Chinese entrepreneurs, will acquire most of Indonesian technology conglomerate GoTo’s e-commerce unit for $840 million. It has also committed to further investing up to $660 million into the acquired unit, taking the total sum to $1.5 billion.
Skadden is acting for TikTok with corporate partners Jonathan Stone and Haiping Li leading the charge. Indonesian firm Widyawan & Partners, with a deal team led by partners Teguh Arwiko, also advised TikTok.
The firm’s former Hong Kong partner Julie Gao, who carved out a name for herself on owning majority legal market share by value for U.S. listings by Chinese companies, left Skadden last year to join ByteDance as chief financial officer.
In 2017, Skadden advised ByteDance, China’s leading artificial intelligence-powered content platform on its acquisition of mobile lip-sync platform Musical.ly. ByteDance is currently also owned by global institutional investors such as Carlyle Group, General Atlantic, and Susquehanna International Group.
TikTok’s deal for GoTo revives TikTok’s e-commerce operations in Indonesia. The company had previously launched an e-commerce offering called TikTok Shop in Indonesia but was forced to cease operations after the country banned online shopping offerings via social media platforms, in a bid to protect its smaller local vendors.
Founded in 2010, GoTo, which is being represented by Davis Polk on its deal with TikTok, operates a digital ecosystem in Indonesia. Its business comprises on-demand transport, e-commerce, food and grocery delivery, logistics and financial services.
GoTo is also being advised by Indonesian firm, Assegaf Hamzah & Partners.
Davis Polk’s team on the TikTok acquisition is led by Hong Kong partner Miranda So. The firm has previously advised GoTo on several of its landmark deals including its $1.1 billion initial public offering on the Indonesian Exchange earlier this year. The firm also acted on the merger between PT Tokopedia and PT Aplikasi Karya Anak Bangsa in 2021, a deal that created the GoTo entity.
Update: This story has been updated to include Indonesian counsel involvement.
