Airtel aims to challenge Reliance Jio with Amazon deal worth 2 billion
US based company Amazon is in early talk with India’s top 3 telecom company Bharti Airtel to buy stake worth at least $2 billion.
The Investment would give approximately 5% stake based on the current market value of Bharti Group. This would give a much needed financial boost to Bharti Group to compete against their competitors Reliance owned Jio and Vodafone-Idea.
Airtel is trying to catch up the current No.1 telecom company Jio, which was transformed as a digital technology platform from a telecom operator. As per the various sources of Retuers, Amazon has been mulling several investment options to buy stake up to 8-10%.
As per source, If the stake sale fails to happen, both companies could look at a commercial transcation which could provide Airtel’s customers a cheap access to Amazon’s digital products.
Bharti group said they work with all digital playersto bring their products, contents and services to their platform. “Beyond that there is no other activity to report” airtel has said.
Over the past six weeks Reliance Jio has sold 20% stake and raised $10 billion from various global investors inluding Facebook, Silver Lake Partners, KKR, General Atlantic, Mubadala etc. Also there are reports that Vodafone-Idea, a joint venture of Britains Vodafone Group and India’s Aditya birla owned Idea Cellular limited is considering by Google for an Investment.
Amazon is counting India as a crucial growth market and committed $ 6.5billion dollar investment for expanding its e-commerce footprint. it also expanded digital offering via Alexa, Prime video and AWS as the market with 1.3 billion people is in the rising of internet and smartphone users.
