Weeks after Facebook invested $ 5.7 billion in Jio Platforms, India's leading telecommunications operator. The private equity firm Silver Lake follows this example.
Silver Lake announced on Monday that it will invest 56.56 billion Indian rupees (approximately $ 746.8 million) in Jio Platforms to gain approximately 1.15% of the Indian telecommunications network. This corresponds to a valuation of USD 65 billion, which is a premium of 12.5% compared to that of the Facebook investment.
Headquartered in Menlo Park, the PE company, with combined assets of around $ 40 billion and committed capital, has invested in dozens of technology companies over the years, including video game engine maker Unity, Skype, the Consulting firms Gartner, Alibabas Ant Financial and Chinese Ride – Hail Giant Didi Chuxing, some of them in the past few weeks. This year, Silver Lake has invested in Expedia, Twitter (in which $ 1 billion was invested), Airbnb, Waymo and ServiceMax.
trust Jio Platforms, which started commercial operations in the second half of 2016, revitalized the local telecommunications market by offering most of the 4G data and voice calls for free to users for six months. A subsidiary of Reliance Industries (India's most valuable company by market value), Jio Platforms has won 388 million subscribers since its launch to become the nation's leading telecommunications operator.
“Jio Platforms is one of the most remarkable companies in the world, led by an incredibly strong and entrepreneurial management team that drives and realizes a bold vision. They have brought exceptional technical skills to deliver the power of low-cost digital services to a mass consumer and small business population. The market potential that you are addressing is huge and we are honored and pleased to have been invited to work with Mukesh Ambani and the Reliance and Jio team to advance the Jio mission, ”said Egon Durban, Co-Managing Director and Managing Partner of Silver Lake, in a statement.
Jio Platforms, formerly known only as Jio, also owns a number of services, including the music streaming service JioSaavn (which is to become a joint stock company), smartphones, the broadband business, the on-demand live television service JioTV and the payment service JioPay .
In a statement, Mukesh Ambani, who oversees Reliance Industries, said: “Silver Lake has an outstanding experience as a valuable partner for leading technology companies worldwide. Silver Lake is one of the most respected voices in technology and finance. We are excited to use insights from their global technology relationships to transform the Indian Digital Society. "
In the company's call for profits last week, Ambani said several companies had expressed interest in buying a stake in Jio Platforms, in which he had invested over $ 30 billion after the deal with Facebook.
Facebook said it would not only offer Jio Platforms the capital for a 9.99% stake in the company, but would also work with the Indian giant in a number of areas, starting with e-commerce.
Days later, JioMart, an e-commerce company from India's highest company, began testing an "order system" on WhatsApp, the most popular smartphone app in India with over 400 million active users in the world's second largest Internet market.
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