Airtel operations to reach new high with Google's $1 billion investment

Mumbai: Through a regulatory filing Bharti Airtel announced the internet giant Google's $1 billion (around Rs 7,400 crore) investment plan in the company over the next five years. As per the deal, Google will acquire 1.28% ownership in Airtel at a price per share of Rs 734 and about $300 million will be invested to scale up Airtel's operations in India.

Google's investment plan is reported to be a part of Sundar Pichai's , the CEO of Alphabet, $10 billion India Digitization Fund announced in 2020.

Airtel in a statement said that "The partnership will focus on enabling affordable access to smartphones across price ranges, and will continue to explore building on their existing partnerships to potentially co-create India-specific network domain use cases for 5G and other standards, and help accelerate the cloud ecosystem for businesses across India."

Google will buy Airtel's 1.28% equity shares that is 7.1 crore equity shares on a preferential basis at Rs 734 per share, worth Rs 5,224.4 crore.

Announcing the investment, Sunil Bharti Mittal, the Chairman of Bharti Airtel said, "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."

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, said, "Our commercial and equity investment in Airtel is a continuation of our Google for India Digitization Fund's efforts to increase access to smartphones, enhance connectivity to support new business models, and help companies on their digital transformation journey."