Google announces Rs 33,737 crore investment for 7.7 percent stake in Reliance Jio

Google will be investing Rs 33,737 crore for a 7.7 percent stake in Reliance Jio Platforms. The announcement was made by Reliance Industries Chairman and MD Mukesh Ambani during RIL's 43rd Annual General Meeting on July 15, 2020. 

Mukesh Ambani welcomed Google as RIL's new strategic partner after introducing all the latest entities that have invested in Jio platforms.  He announced that Reliance Jio and Google together will develop an android-based smartphone operating system to design affordable entry-level 4G-5G smartphones.

Objective

The Reliance Jio-Google partnership aims to make India 2G-mukt and enable almost 350 million Indians to migrate from their current 2G feature phones to more affordable 4G-5G smartphones.  This will increase the accessibility of smart phones and help accelerate India's digital economy.

Significance 

Reliance Jio has attracted investments worth over USD 15 billion in just a matter of few months amid COVID lockdown. Qualcomm Ventures was the latest to invest Rs 730 crore in Jio Platforms for a 0.15 percent stake. Overall, Reliance Jio has seen 12 investments within 12 weeks. Facebook was the first one to announce an investment worth Rs 43574 crore in Jio for a 9.9 percent stake on April 22, 2020. 

List of Investments in Reliance Jio

Background

Google-RIL deal was announced just two days after Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced that Google will be investing around Rs 75000 crore in India over the next 5-7 years through its ‘Google for India Digitization Fund’. With this, the tech giant joins Facebook and the long list of private equity firms, which invested in Jio Platforms over the past three months.