The News
A scandal-plagued Chinese e-commerce firm will operate the commercial arm of the world’s most popular TikToker — and his AI avatar — as part of a nearly $1 billion all-stock deal aimed at replicating China’s massive livestream sales model overseas.
Khaby Lame, a Senegalese-Italian influencer with more than 160 million TikTok followers, became an international sensation for his wordless reactions mocking overly complex viral videos. His clips speak a “global language,” he said in 2021.
Last month, regulatory filings showed his management company struck a $975 million all-stock deal with US-listed Rich Sparkle Holdings, a Hong Kong-based printing and PR firm with only $6 million in annual revenue. The company’s stock surged over 650% in the week after the deal, then crashed 77% over the following week, prompting one veteran short seller to label it “a Chinese stock promotion.” As part of the transaction, Lame is becoming a major shareholder in the company, which has set an audacious target of bringing in $4 billion in annual revenue by an unspecified date.
The firm enlisted with helping Lame test whether China’s massive livestream e-commerce model can be transplanted to Western markets using international celebrities and new AI capabilities is Three Sheep Group, led by “Crazy” Little Brother Yang — the top influencer on Douyin, TikTok’s Chinese sibling.
Three Sheep has previously faced a slew of social media controversies, including a $10 million fine for hawking mooncakes that came from mainland China but were falsely promoted as luxury Hong Kong products. The company only got the green light from Chinese authorities to resume operations in March 2025, and started live-streaming again last month.
Yang, who was China’s fourth-ranked internet celebrity in 2024 by net income, helped turn the country’s stream-based e-commerce sector into a huge moneymaker. Pitching and selling products live on camera while viewers shop in real time, he could garner up to $7 million in sales in a single stream.
Three Sheep, which will exclusively operate Lame’s commercial activities for the next three years, plans to use its “ultimate supply chain” to target the US, Middle East, and Southeast Asian markets, according to a press release. The setup is “designed not merely to monetize attention, but to industrialize it.”
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J.D.’s view
It’s unclear when the new venture with Lame might launch, what kind of products it will sell, and how the business will work. Legal experts have already raised red flags over the business deal, which is shrouded in secrecy. Rich Sparkle didn’t respond to requests for comment, and representatives for Lame couldn’t be reached.
But the press release offers some clues into what the experiment could look like: Lame’s AI avatar “opens the door to cross-time-zone, long-duration virtual livestream commerce,” according to Rich Sparkle.
In other words, we’re not far off from a world where Chinese factories make products, which are then sold by influencers and their AI avatars via TikTok Shop or other livestream platforms 24/7, and subsequently shipped all over the world by China-based supply chains.
The question is whether the rest of the world wants to shop via live-streamed avatars the way consumers in China have been doing for several years — even if those avatars can wordlessly gesture like Khaby Lame.
Room for Disagreement
Chinese business leaders are bullish on AI personalization as the future of e-commerce. The country has become a massive laboratory “for a future where retail is predictive, personalized, and perpetually ‘on,’” Jing Daily wrote last year, so it may only be a matter of time before that concept is exported to the rest of the world.
Alibaba Group’s vice president called AI the “backbone” of e-commerce last year, and JD.com’s founder has livestreamed in the form of an AI salesperson. The head of one Chinese marketing company said its virtual bots consistently outperform human sellers.
Western brands should jump on the tech-first bandwagon or risk getting left behind in the Chinese market, Vogue Business wrote.
Notable
- The ambitious targets of the venture aren’t rooted in Lame’s proven financials, but rather the “gravitational pull of his audience,” Digiday wrote. It represents the “kind of fuzzy, modern math” the marketing industry has gotten comfortable with.
- Forbes explored how the financials of the transaction raise red flags indicative of a pump-and-dump scheme.