Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Monday, February 8th. This is your FT News Briefing.

The short video app Tiktok is planning a push into e-commerce, which means more competition

for Facebook. Cuba says it's opening up its economy to most non-state businesses, meaning

the private sector, and Mercedes-Benz has offered up a timeline for when electric vehicle

profits are expected to reach a major milestone. Plus, we'll take a look at how the worldwide

shift to clean energy could reshape the geopolitical landscape. I'm Mark Filipino, and here's

the news you need to start your day. Facebook's push into e-commerce this past year has

reaped big profits for the social media site. Now the viral video app Tiktok also has plans

to turn its users into on-site consumers. I'm on the line with the FT's Hannah Murphy,

she covers social media for the FT, and now let's start with Tiktok's plans. What's

its push into e-commerce going to look like? So Tiktok are looking to launch a slew of

new tools to facilitate more online shopping. This is including the ability for any of its

influences to share a link to a brand's product and make money if a user then clicks on that

link and buys an item. And that's even if the influencer's not formally sponsored by

the brand in any way. So essentially, this is sort of integrated affiliate marketing,

and it encourages influences to drive sales for businesses in a pretty organic way. A couple

of other things, they're introducing the ability for brands to upload their product catalogs

to the platform, so you can sort of see a real of products and easily click through

them by those. And then finally, Tiktok's planning to introduce more live shopping experiences.

So this is sort of mobile phone version of television shopping channels where users can

buy goods with a couple of taps after seeing them showcased by Tiktok influencers live.

They started testing this in December, I believe, through a tie-up with Walmart, and this

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