General Atlantic to invest $870M in India’s Reliance Jio Platforms
Mukesh Ambani’s Jio Platforms has agreed to sell 1.34% stake to General Atlantic, the latest in a series of deals the top Indian telecom operator has secured in recent weeks.
On Sunday, New York-headquartered private equity firm General Atlantic said it would invest $869.8 million in the Indian telecom operator, a subsidiary of India’s most valued firm Reliance Industries, joining Facebook, Silver Lake, and Vista Equity Partners that have made sizeable bets on the three-and-a-half-year old Indian firm.
General Atlantic’s investment values Jio Platforms at $65 billion (equity valuation) — the same valuation implied by the Silver Lake and Vista deals and a 12.5% premium over Facebook’s deal, the Indian firm said.
Sunday’s announcement further illustrates the growing appeal of Jio Platforms, which has raised $8.85 billion in the past one month, to foreign investors looking for a slice in the fast-growing world’s second largest internet market.
General Atlantic, a high profile investor in consumer tech space, has invested in dozens of firms such as Airbnb, Alibaba, Ant Financial, Box, ByteDance, Facebook, Slack, Snapchat, and Uber.
It has also made several investments in India, including in NoBroker, a Bangalore-based startup that helps those looking to rent or buy an apartment connect directly with property owners, and edtech giants Unacademy and Byju’s.
Reliance Industries chairman Ambani said Jio Platforms would “leverage General Atlantic’s proven global expertise and strategic insights across 40 years of technology investing.”
“General Atlantic shares our vision of a digital society for India and strongly believes in the transformative power of digitization in enriching the lives of 1.3 billion Indians,” he added.
Launched in the second half of 2016, Reliance Jio upended India’s telecommunications industry with cut-rate data plans and free voice calls. Jio Platforms, a subsidiary of Reliance Industries (India’s most valued firm), operates the telecom venture, called Jio Infocomm, that has amassed 388 million subscribers since its launch to become the nation’s top telecom operator.
Reliance Jio Platforms also owns a suite of services including music streaming service JioSaavn (which it plans to take public), smartphones, broadband business, on-demand live television service JioTV and payments service JioPay.
Sandeep Naik, MD and Head of India & Southeast Asia at General Atlantic, said, “in just three and a half years, Jio has had a transformational impact in democratizing data and digital services, propelling India to be positioned as a leading global digital economy.”
More to follow…
Mukesh Ambani’s Jio Platforms has agreed to sell 1.34% stake to General Atlantic, the latest in a series of deals the top Indian telecom operator has secured in recent weeks. On Sunday, New York-headquartered private equity firm General Atlantic said it would invest $869.8 million in the Indian telecom operator,…
