Piper says TikTok ownership change would have negligible value impact on peers

Among various TikTok policy measures being proposed, the RESTRICT Act sponsored by Senators Warner and Thune would classify TikTok as a threat and give the President the authority to ban the app, while two other proposed bills would direct him to do so, Piper Sandler analyst Thomas Champion noted. The firm’s U.S. Macro Policy team’s base case assumes Congressional support for the RESTRICT Act and passage this year, which could result in an order for ByteDance to divest TikTok, the analyst tells investors. In an outright ban scenario, there’s the opportunity for a redistribution of Tiktok’s estimated 100M U.S. MAU’s, but should the RESTRICT Act move forward, the policy team sees a forced divestiture as more likely than an outright ban, said Piper, which adds that it thinks an ownership change would have a "negligible value implication" for social peers Meta (META), Snap (SNAP) and Alphabet’s (GOOGL) Youtube. However, a ban would have "significant peer implications" given TikTok’s reach, estimated at 1B users globally and 100M in the U.S., the firm added.