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Reliance Industries on Wednesday held its 43rd Annual general meeting in Mumbai. At the time of uploading this news, Reliance Industries’s MD Mukesh Amabani was still giving his speech at the highly anticipated AGM. Within Half-hour into his speech, Amabani came out with some big announcements but the one announcement that stood out (at least so far) is Google’s strategic investment in Reliance Jio.
Amabani said that Google will pick up 7.7% stake in Jio for INR 33,737 Crore, technically making the Google the second-biggest minority stakeholder in Jio after Facebook, which owns 9.9% stake.
“We welcome Google as a strategic investor in JioPlatform. We’ve signed a binding partnership & investment agreement under which Google will invest Rs 33,737 crores for a 7.7% stake,” Mukesh Ambani said at Reliance’s 43rd AGM.
The investment will be obviously subjected to regulatory approval from the Competition Commission of India (CCI).
Notably, Ambani has used the word ‘strategic investor’ for Google, which potentially means that Google’s partnership with Jio may go beyond equity investment and might strike partnership, similar to JioMart, in near future.
Interestingly, the announcement about Google’s investment in Jio has come barely days after Sundar Pichai announced that the American tech giant will be investing $10 Bn in India. Well, now it can be safely assumed that major chunk of the $10Bn investment was specially reserved for Jio.
Google will now join some of the biggest tech companies as an investor in India’s richest and largest telecom company. This includes Intel, Qualcomm and, of course, Facebook. Google will also join high profile investors like General Atlantic, KKR, Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund, Abu Dhabi State Fund and Saudi Arabia’s PIF.
This will be first time that Google and Facebook, who are major competitors, will become investors in the same company.
In another big announcement, Ambani made a big announcement on the upcoming launch of 5G network, claiming that the 5G network will be completely made in India as a part of Atamnirbhar Bharat.
Over the last few months, Reliance Jio has been setting the temperature soaring on the investment front, after accumulating whopping INR 1,52.056 crore from the stake sale. This stake sale almost comes down to 33%.
Never probably in India’s corporate history has any private company raised such colossal amount of capital from foreign investors. This unprecedented stake sale, by the way, has also helped Mukesh Ambani to become 6th richest man in the world.
And yes before we wrap up this news story, here is another breaking news that our readers got to know: Reliance has now become the first Indian company to cross the market capitalization of $150 Bn.
