- Google announced it has invested $4.5 billion in Jio Platforms for a 7.73% stake in the India-based telecommunications company. These are the details.
Google announced it has invested $4.5 billion in Jio Platforms for a 7.73% stake in the India-based telecommunications company. The deal was announced by Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani this week.
Over the last couple of months, Jio Platforms revealed that it raised billions in funding from Qualcomm, Mubadala Investment, Silver Lake, Intel, KKR, Facebook, Vista Equity Partners, and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF).
With this investment, Jio Platforms raised nearly $25 billion total. Most of that amount was raised in the last 4 months. Google had invested in Jio Platforms at a $58 billion valuation while several investors bought stake at a valuation of about $65 billion. Google’s stake was at about the same valuation that Facebook paid.
The investment from Google was strategic as the companies will be working together on a custom version of Android for lower-cost smartphones. Those smartphones will also support Google Play and support the 5G wireless standard.
“For Google, our work in India goes to the heart of our efforts to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible. We opened our first Indian campuses in Bangalore and Hyderabad in 2004. Since then, we’ve made India central to our Next Billion Users initiative—designed to ensure the internet is useful for people coming online for the first time. We’ve improved our apps and services so they’re relevant in more Indian languages and created offline versions for those facing network constraints. We’ve extended our tools to small businesses, sought to close digital divides with initiatives like Internet Saathi, and we’re increasingly focused on helping India harness AI. More and more, apps we create for India—like GPay or our Read Along language-learning app—influence what we do globally,” wrote Google Country Head & VP, India Sanjay Gupta and VP of Product Management Sameer Samat in a company blog post.
Earlier this week, Google also unveiled a new fund for investing $10 billion in India over the next five to seven years. And this investment is Google’s first investment from its Google For India Digitization Fund.
Jio has over 400 million subscribers. And all of those subscribers were accumulated in under four years.
