TikTok is scouting the Midlands property market for a big-box warehouse as part of early-stage plans to expand the UK logistics operation behind its ecommerce platform, TikTok Shop, CoStar News can reveal.
Market sources said that the social media giant is looking to secure an industrial unit of up to 500,000 square feet in the region, looking across East and West, with an internal team leading the search.
Sources added that the company, which has UK offices at London's 4 Lindsey Street, Barbican, EC1, is exploring a handful of secondary warehouse units, in an area from Wolverhampton to Stoke-on-Trent.
The tech behemoth's hunt for a large Midlands facility for Fulfilled by TikTok, the logistics division that handles TikTok Shop's storage, packing and shipping, follows the continued growth of the ecommerce business, which launched in the UK in 2021.
TikTok Shop, used by more than 200,000 small and medium-sized businesses in the UK, lets people sell products inside the TikTok app, with merchants able to advertise their products in short videos or livestreams. Fulfilled by TikTok was launched in 2023 to handle product deliveries for vendors and buyers using the online shop.
CoStar News also understands that TikTok is looking to partner with a third-party logistics specialist to operate its new warehouse, with more than half a dozen firms expected to bid for the contract.
In the UK, German firm Fiege is already running a circa 261,000-square-foot facility for Fulfilled by TikTok at DC2 Prologis Park Hams Hall, outside Birmingham city centre.
Fiege signed a lease at the BREEAM Excellent facility to carry out work for a "major existing ecommerce client" in October, marking its first site in the country. Chinese firm Super Smart Services, which has been growing in the UK alongside peers like JD Logistics, is another third-party logistics firm used by TikTok.
The social media platform, owned by Chinese firm ByteDance and launched in the UK in 2018, has global headquarters in Los Angeles and Singapore, and has other offices in New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Dubai, Jakarta, Seoul and Tokyo. Its US operations are now run by global and US investors following long-running battles over data privacy.
TikTok declined to comment.