Telco company Bharti Airtel declared that gigantic search engine company Google gave a yes nod to invest $1 billion in their company.
The pact includes investment of USD 700 million in exchange for 1.28% ownership in Airtel and USD 300 million for probable multi-year commercial agreements. The union tends to focus on affordable smartphones across various price ranges and will concurrently emphasize on creating India-specific network domains for 5G services. The collaboration will also facilitate the cloud ecosystem for umpteen number of businesses across India.
“Under the larger strategic goals of the partnership, both companies will also potentially co-create India-specific network domain use cases for 5G and other standards, with cutting-edge implementations. Airtel is already using Google’s 5G-ready Evolved Packet Core and Software Defined Network platforms, and plans to explore scaling up the deployment of Google’s network virtualisation solutions to deliver a superior network experience to their customers,” company said in their written statement.
Sunil Bharti Mittal, Chairman of Bharti Airtel said, “Airtel and Google share the vision to grow India’s digital dividend through innovative products. With our future ready network, digital platforms, last mile distribution and payments ecosystem, we look forward to working closely with Google to increase the depth and breadth of India’s digital ecosystem.”
CEO Sundar Pichai added “Our commercial and equity investment in Airtel is a continuation of our Google for India Digitization Fund’s efforts to increase access to smartphones, enhance connectivity to support new business models, and help companies on their digital transformation journey.”
The amount given is said to be a part of the USD 10 billion ‘Google for India Digitization Fund’, announced by CEO of Google and Alphabet Sundar Pichai in 2020. This all will be included in equity as well as a corpus for potential commercial agreements, the company said in a statement.
