Google has announced an investment of up to $1 billion in Airtel as part of its Google for India Digitization Fund.
The deal includes investment of $700 million to acquire 1.28% ownership in Bharti Airtel and up to $300 million towards potential multi-year commercial agreements, which will include investments in scaling Airtel’s offerings that covers a range of devices to consumers via innovative affordability programs as well as other offerings aimed at accelerating access and digital inclusion across India’s digital ecosystem.
This investment is part of a long term, multi-year agreement to accelerate the growth of India’s digital ecosystem.
Together, both companies will work to bring best-in-class end-to-end products to serve customer needs, provide quality customer experience, and bring their expertise to solve problems of affordability, access, and digital inclusion.
Airtel is the second largest telecoms operator in India with over 300 million subscribers and over 480 million customers in 17 countries across South Asia and Africa.
Part of the commercial agreement includes both companies working on ways to bring down the barriers of owning a smartphone across a range of price points, in partnership with various device manufacturers.
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 & 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.
Both companies will also focus on shaping and growing the cloud ecosystem in India to accelerate their digital transformation journeys.
Airtel serves over one million small and medium businesses with its enterprise connectivity offering, and this partnership will help accelerate digital adoption.
