Google To Invest Up To $1 Billion In Bharti Airtel As Part Of Its India Digitization Fund

The Indian telecommunications company Bharti Airtel and Google announced on Friday, January 28, 2022, that both parties have now signed a long-term cooperation agreement. Under the agreement, Google is now investing up to $ 1 billion in India's second largest mobile operator. Thanks to a multi-year agreement, both companies are now working to accelerate the growth of India's digital ecosystem.

Alphabet Inc., which owns the Google search engine, announced in an exchange auction that it will pay $ 700 million for a 1.28 percent stake in Bharti Airtel Ltd. plans to incorporate the tools created by these two technology giants. The agreement sees the partnership between the two companies in a race to offer cheap data and digital offerings in a single market of more than a billion people, which is still open to foreign companies.

The $ 1 billion Indian fund from the world's second-largest mobile operator comes as part of Google's $ 10 billion "Google for India Digitalization Fund." The program was previously announced by Google CEO and Alphabet Sundar Pichai in 2020. According to the company, the project will include capital investment as well as a corpus for potential business agreements with agreed terms over the next five years. Google also announced in a statement that it will work with a telecommunications company based in Delhi to improve the situation in the Indian market.

According to the company, the focus of the partnership is the possibility of affordable access to smartphones in different price ranges and the possibility of jointly creating network domains specifically for India. The deal could also help the two companies build a 5G application and accelerate the cloud ecosystem for businesses in the developing world.

However, the deal is still ongoing and has not yet been approved by regulators. The investment deal comes just months after Airtel raised up to Rs 210 billion by selling shares to current shareholders. Meanwhile, Airtel shares rose slightly following the announcement, trading at around Rs.718 as of 1pm on Friday.