Airtel today announced that it signed a long-term agreement with Google to accelerate the growth of India’s digital ecosystem. As part of this initiative, Google as a part of Google for India Digitization Fund will make an investment in Airtel, which will include a $700M equity investment for a 1.28% stake in the telecom operator.
Along with this a corpus of up to $300M will go towards implementing mutually agreed commercial initiatives over the course of the next five years. Moreover, both companies also plan to co-create India-specific network domain use cases for 5G and other standards including cloud ecosystem targeting small and medium businesses across the country.
The deal has been moved to the next step and work will start after getting the necessary regulatory approvals.
Sunil Bharti Mittal, Chairman of Bharti Airtel, said:
Airtel and Google share the vision to grow India’s digital dividend through innovative products. With our future-ready network, digital platforms, last-mile distribution and payments ecosystem, we look forward to working closely with Google to increase the depth and breadth of India’s digital ecosystem.
