Bharti Airtel and Google partner to accelerate growth in India's digital ecosystem

Bharti Airtel and Google today announced that they will partner on a long-term, multi-year agreement to accelerate the growth of Indiafs digital ecosystem. Together, they 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.

As part of this partnership, Google intends to invest up to $1B, as part of its Google for India Digitization Fund, which includes equity investment as well as a corpus for potential commercial agreements, to be identified and agreed on mutually agreeable terms over the course of the next five years. This will comprise:

A $700M equity investment in Bharti Airtel at a price per share of INR 734.

Up to $300M that will go towards implementing commercial agreements, which will include investments in scaling Airtelfs 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 Indiafs digital ecosystem.

This deal will be subject to necessary regulatory approvals.

As a part of its first commercial agreement, Airtel and Google will work together to build on Airtelfs extensive offerings that covers a range of Android-enabled devices to consumers via innovative affordability programs. Together, the companies will continue to explore further opportunities 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 Googlefs 5G-ready Evolved Packet Core & Software Defined Network platforms, and plans to explore scaling up the deployment of Googlefs 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.

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