Google eyes India's 400 million online users by investing $4 billion in Jio.
Google aims to be a partner in digital giant Reliance industries Jio platform and plans to invest a whopping $4 billion dollars in the venture. Google will join hands with Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook and as a major shift of private firms inclined toward Mukesh Ambani’s technology venture, which already has received more than $15 billion of investment.
The latest investor in Jio industries was an arm of Qualcomm Inc, which involved Silver Lake Partners and Mubadala Investment Co. Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai, earlier today in an interview with ET neither owned the news nor dejected the reports of Google’s interest in joining hands with Jio.
In a recent announcement made by Google to invest $10 billion in order boost India’s digital ecosystem of the world’s fifth-largest economy that is emerging as a strong field for the world’s global giants. Google stepped ahead by investing double the amount invested by its rival Facebook of $5.7 in India’s largest conglomerate Reliance Industries in the month of April. It will go through a mixture of investments and partnerships, Pichai said in an interview with ET on Monday.
“We are going to financially invest in India’s large companies, startup’s and partnerships. we also look towards investing in infrastructure investment such as data centers, through a mix of equity investment,” he said. The move will benefit bigger companies and will provide an opportunity to make a larger investment directly as we look at the fund size.
As there are enough deals for Ambani’s Jio that will prove beneficial to his goal of morphing Reliance industries from an energy set-up to an economic giant. Reliance Jio is center of attention for Ambani in order to erect a homegrown version of China’s Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.
Jio’s partnership with Facebook has given the company a silicon valley stamp, the venture has pulled massive amount of investors, who were lured by its potential to knock up online retail, healthcare, digital payment, content streaming, education in a market of 1.3 billion people.
“There is the business to consumer sector like digital and retail which are much more irrepressible to economic catastrophe,” said Harsh Dole, an analyst at India Infoline Finance Ltd. “These sectors ferry a premium return for valuation. The stock has been a beneficiary of that, without any doubt.”
Facebook has partnered in 10% of Jio platforms by investing $5.7 billion and stated that it expects the stake will make WhatsApp the primary of source for millions of India’s small businesses to connect with customers. The messaging app has nearly 400 million users in India almost the same as Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd’s subscribers base for wireless services.
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