Google has entered into a partnership with Bharti Airtel where it will invest around Rs. 7500 crores in Airtel to help grow India’s digital ecosystem. The deal that has materialized includes an investment of around Rs. 5260 crores to allow Google to get acquire a 1.28% ownership in Airtel and the rest Rs. 2250 crores will be used in multi-year commercial agreements.
Airtel and Google together will work to bring best-in-class end-to-end products to serve customer needs, provide quality customer experience, and bring their expertise to solve problems of affordability, access, and digital inclusion.
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The 1-billion-dollar investment comes as a part of the Mountain View, California- based giant’s Google For India Digitization Fund. The investment includes an equity investment as well as a corpus for potential commercial agreements, to be identified and agreed mutually agreeable terms over the next 5 years.
Within the 1-billion-dollar investment, Google will take ownership of 1.28% in Airtel for 700 million dollars for Rs, 734 per share. The rest of the 300 million dollars will go towards scaling Airtel’s offerings that cover a range of devices to consumers via “innovative affordability programs as well as other offerings aimed at accelerating access and digital inclusion across India’s digital ecosystem.”
The deal will be subject to necessary regulatory approvals. Both the companies have claimed that they know the importance of a “Connected India” in empowering businesses as they progress on their Digital Transformation journeys and building a strong digital ecosystem for consumers everywhere.
“Both organizations are committed to working to build an open technology ecosystem that serves customers and businesses with innovative digital services, and have agreed on jointly exploring and investing across a wide spectrum of areas to create digital solutions that uniquely serve India’s requirements,” the statement said.
The deal that has materialized includes Google’s support in helping Airtel make a range of affordable Android-based devices. In the statement, Airtel and Google have hinted at making smartphones more affordable for Indian users. The statement reads that the two companies “aim to bring down the barriers of owning a smartphone across a range of price points, in partnership with various device manufacturers,” meaning that the 2 plan on partnering for making smartphones more affordable in India.
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Further, Airtel and Google will also co-create India’s network domain use cases for 5G and other standards. The statement said that Airtel is already using Google’s 5 G-ready Evolved Packet Core and Software Defined Network platforms, and further plans to scale up the deployment of Google’s network virtualization solutions to deliver a superior network quality.
The two companies will also focus on shaping and growing the cloud ecosystem in India to accelerate their digital transformation journeys.
