TikTok has raised its e-commerce gross merchandise value (GMV) target to $20 billion this year, according to a Bloomberg report. That would be a rapid increase from last year’s $4.4 billion in GMV, which is the total worth of goods sold through its TikTok Shop offering, sources told Bloomberg. TikTok is banking on South Asian markets, like Indonesia, where influencers leverage live-streamed videos to promote and sell products. It started to roll out similar services for markets including Indonesia, Vietnam, and the UK in 2021. Previous reports revealed that its e-commerce GMV in Indonesia averaged around $200 million per month in the first half of 2022, while the figure for the UK during the same period was $24 million. While it has since scaled back its British business, the ByteDance-owned short video app continues to thrive in Southeast Asia, a market where competitors such as Alibaba’s Lazada are also present. “The rapid growth of TikTok Shop poses a direct threat to Southeast Asia’s incumbent e-commerce leaders,” Simon Torring, co-founder of e-commerce research firm Cube Asia, told Bloomberg. “It is however still too early to declare TikTok Shop’s victory. It has not yet demonstrated the ability to gain significant growth momentum outside the beauty and fashion categories, and a lot of the current growth is heavily subsidized by TikTok through vouchers and aggressive marketing spending.” [Bloomberg]