Bharti Airtel announced that it will receive $1 billion investment from Google as part of its Google for India Digitization Fund.
The $1 billion investment includes equity investment as well as a corpus for potential commercial agreements over the course of the next five years.
Google will make $700 million equity investment in Bharti Airtel at a price per share of INR 734.
Airtel said up to $300 million will go towards implementing commercial agreements, which will include investments in scaling Airtel’s offerings that covers devices to consumers via innovative affordability programs.
This deal will be subject to necessary regulatory approvals.
Airtel and Google will work together to offer cost effective smartphones across a range of price points, in partnership with various device manufacturers.
Airtel and Google will co-create India-specific network domain use cases for 5G and other standards. Airtel is already using Google’s 5G-ready Evolved Packet Core & Software Defined Network platforms.
Airtel and Google will explore scaling up the deployment of Google’s network virtualisation solutions to deliver a superior network experience to their customers.
Airtel and Google will be growing the cloud ecosystem in India to accelerate their digital transformation. Airtel serves over one million small and medium businesses with its enterprise connectivity offering, and this partnership will help accelerate digital adoption.
“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,” Sunil Bharti Mittal, Chairman of Bharti Airtel said.
“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,” Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, said.
