Google just announced that it will invest over 10 billion dollars (Rs 75,000 crore approx) over the next 5-7 years in the country as a push for its India-specific digitisation program.
As per a BloombergQuint report, the American tech giant is looking to invest 4 billion dollars in Jio Platforms and the announcement is likely to be made in the next couple of weeks.
In the past couple of months, Jio Platforms has been hot property and has attracted various foreign investors from Facebook to Qualcomm. The biggest investment till now has been from Facebook which has a 9.9 percent minority stake in the company.
The news of Google looking to invest in Jio comes a couple of months after a Financial Times report said that Google was eyeing a 5 percent stake in Vodafone Idea, a company that is currently struggling in the Indian telecom sector.
If the deal comes through, not only will Google be able to leverage the vast reach that Jio currently enjoys in tier 1 and tier 2 cities but will also be able to make its payment services more diverse with Jio’s retail platform.
This deal could also intensify the rivalry between Google and Facebook and it will be interesting to see how both the American biggies co-exist on an Indian ecosystem.
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