How to acquire 700 million customers for only $7.85 a piece (not to mention 100,000 commercial customers and 2,000 enterprise customers.
Competitor Alien invade Investments in India by are now complicated by Google’s taking a position in Bharti Airtel, the 2nd largest mobile carrier in India. The investment was funded from the USD$10B Google For India Digitization Fund strategy. The equity investment of USD$700M into Bharti Airtel is for 1.28% of the equity of the carrier. Another USD$300M looks to collaborations focused on accessibility of services and 5G. The effects on the Indian telecommunications market are higher levels of competition and raising the levels of investment for other carriers.
Google’s investment in Bharti Airtel is stated to improve affordability, access, and extend use of 5G and cloud technologies. A focus is also to expand deployment of Google’s software defined network infrastructure and supports for virtual network provisioning. Addressing needs of the 1M SME and 2000 larger enterprises with other Google products is also a benefit. As Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure command a majority of the India Cloud Computing market this will intensify competition across multiple compute and communications market segments.
Similar to Google’s larger (USD$4.5B) investment in Reliance Industries’ Jio, the service collaborations between the carriers and Google are expected to elevate the presence of Google’s services and products. Investing in the #1 and #2 carriers also puts Google in a handsome position to have a direct access and influence on more than 65% of all Indian subscribers (450M Jio, 350M Airtel) with a strong reach as an equity holder. Jio already loads a localized version of Android complete with Google features as a result of the investments. Seen as a competitive tactic against global rivals the scale and benefits for Google seem reasonable.
EkaLore looks at deploying capital, monetizing expertise, and applying technology as characteristics of an Alien Invader into a marketspace. Google’s use of USD$5.5B in capital, Andriod/Google Cloud products, and infrastructure technologies is certainly an Alien Invasion into the Indian marketspaces. Competition is clearly increased with Chinese, EU, and other US firms.
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