Telecom operator Airtel okays Rs 5,000 crore fundraise from Google
NEW DELHI: Telecom operator Bharti Airtel on Thursday approved fundraising of over Rs 5,000 crore through preferential allotment of 7.11 crore shares to US-based tech giant Google at an issue price of Rs 734 per share. Following this deal, Google will hold 1.2% of total post-issue equity shares in Airtel.
“Special Committee of Directors for Preferential Allotment of the Company has, at its meeting held today approved the allotment of 71,176,839 equity shares on a preferential basis to Google International LLC at an issue price of Rs. 734 per equity share (including a premium of Rs. 729 per equity share),” said the company in an exchange filing.
In January 2022, the search engine giant said it would invest $700 million in India’s second-largest telecom company. The deal includes an investment of $700 million to acquire 1.28% ownership in Airtel over the next five years and up to $300 million towards potential multi-year commercial agreements.
As per the partnership, Airtel and Google will focus on enabling affordable access to smartphones across price ranges and will continue to explore building on their existing partnerships to potentially co-create India-specific network domain use cases for 5G and other standards, and help accelerate the cloud ecosystem for businesses across India.
“The paid-up equity share capital of the company will stand increased to “`28,306,517,827.50 divided into 5,563,231,650 fully paid-up equity shares of Rs 5 each and 392,287,662 partly- paid-up equity shares of Rs 5 each”, said the company. The deal will help the telco to bid in the upcoming 5G spectrum auction, which will take place on 26 July 2022.