Google has invested 4.5B USD in Jio becoming both Partner and Investor.
Jio and Google have also entered into a commercial agreement to jointly develop an entry-level affordable smartphone with Android operating system optimizations.
Strategic Partner and Investor
Google will enter partnership with Jio both as a partner and as a investor.
“The pace and scale of digital transformation in India is hugely inspiring for us and reinforces our view that building products for India first helps us build better products for users everywhere”
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet
“We believe we can design an entry-level 4G… or even 5G smartphone for a fraction of its current cost,” Ambani said while announcing Google’s investments.
Google and Jio Platforms will also collaborate to develop “an entry-level affordable smartphone with optimizations to the Android operating system and the Play Store”, the two companies said in a joint statement on Wednesday.
Google’s investment in Jio will come from its new $10 billion India digitization fund. Facebook invested $5.7 billion in Jio Platforms in April while Microsoft’s venture fund M12 said last month it would open an office in India to pursue investment opportunities. Amazon is investing an additional $1 billion in India
“In the next three years, I can see a strong path for Jio to connect over a 0.5 billion mobile customers; over 1 billion smart sensors; and over 50 million homes and business establishments,” said Ambani.
Other Announcements
There were other interesting announcements, one of them was the new JioTV+ which is going to feature aggregated content from a variety of OTT players. These include Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+ Hotstar, Voot, SonyLiv, Zee5, JioCinema, JioSaavn, YouTube and more.
The company has also announced the Jio App Store inviting developers to create apps for Jio TV. The Jio set-top-box is currently running on Android TV 7.0 and it is possible that the new Android TV 9 Pie update will bring the new JioTV+ platform built-in.
Jio Glass also made a debut with the demo. “Jio Glass is making teachers and students come together in 3D virtual rooms and conduct holographic classes through our Jio Mixed Reality cloud in real-time. With Jio Glass, the traditional way of learning geography will now be history,” Mr Thomas said
Airtel, India’s third-largest telecom company, has partnered with Verizon, US-based telecom giant to launch BlueJeans video-conferencing app in India.
