Bharti Airtel and Google have announced a partnership where Google will invest $1 billion (roughly Rs 7,500 crores) in Airtel in order to help grow India’s digital ecosystem. The deal also includes an investment of $700 million (roughly Rs 5,260 crores) which will allow Google to acquire 1.28 percent ownership in Airtel and the rest $300 million (roughly Rs 2,250 crores) will go towards a multi-year commercial agreements. The two companies will work together 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.
The $1 billion investment comes as a part of the Mountain View, California-based giant’s Google For India Digitization Fund. It also includes an equity investment as well as a corpus for potential commercial agreements, to be identified and agreed on mutually agreeable terms over the course of the next five years. Within the $1 billion investment, Google will take ownership of 1.28 percent in Airtel for $700 million at a price of Rs 734 per share. The rest of the $300 million will go towards scaling Airtel’s offerings that covers 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. The companies said in a statement that they recognise 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 organisations are committed towards working to build an open technology ecosystem that serves customers and businesses with innovative digital services, and have agreed to jointly explore and invest across a wide spectrum of areas to create digital solutions that uniquely serves India’s requirements,” the statement said.
The deal also 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 two plan on partnering for making smartphones more affordable in India.
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 5G-ready Evolved Packet Core and Software Defined Netfork platforms, and further plans to scale up the delpoyment of Google’s network virtualisation 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.
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Source: News18