NUS Professor Sumit Agarwal talks to Fortune Times journalist on Nov 22, 2022
(Singapore, 22/11/2022) TikTok has more potential for future development as a social media platform than Facebook or Twitter, Sumit Agarwal, a professor of National University of Singapore, told Fortune Times today.
“TikTok has been rising, while Twitter and Facebook have been falling off, ” said Sumit Agarwal, Low Tuck Kwong Distinguished Professor of Finance at the NUS Business School.
He said that as generations are changing, their preference towards social media are changing as well. For older generations, they used to read a full book or a newspaper article, however nowadays, younger generations prefer to convey their message in short text, or even just a picture or a short video.
“If you look at the 15 or 20 years old youngsters these days, they don’t want to know what Facebook is, they don’t want to know what Twitter is, but they want to know what TikTok is. They want 7 second videos, that’s what they want”, the professor added.
Recently, many big technology companies, including Meta, parent company of Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and Shopee, started to lay off their employees, but TikTok doesn’t follow their suit.
The professor explained that it is because TikTok has been growing in popularity.
“TikTok is so popular that that I bet they have shortage of employees. They don’t even mind having slack, they don’t mind having wasted employees who don’t do much, because they say, look, we are so profitable, investors like it, so they are in a different world.”
Sumit pointed out that some big tech companies slashed their staff to cut down expenses, mainly due to the stock falls of the tech companies.
“When the tech companies stocks fall, they have to go and raise funding from investors. Now the investors are saying, why should I invest in you? Your costs are high, your revenue is not there, so these tech bosses realise that they have to cut cost.”
Since the beginning of the year, Meta’s share price has fallen more than 67 percent, while Amazon’s has dropped more than 45 percent and Google’s has fallen nearly 28 percent.
