Last week, EkaLore posted about challenges and opportunities for Reliance JIO in the Indian marketplace. This post focuses on Meta's investment in JIO and reviews the results.
In April 2020, Meta/Facebook invested USD$5.7 billion in Reliance and JIO. This investment gave Meta/Facebook a 9.99% stake in JIO Platforms, valued based on its 388 million subscribers. At the time, Facebook's WhatsApp had 400 million users since its launch in 2009. In April 2023, Reliance and JIO raised USD$5 billion in debt financing, with USD$2.5 billion allocated specifically to JIO. This was the first major debt increase since 2020.
Despite Facebook's investment, Google continues to have a dominant position with Android OS smartphones in India (>95% market share) also means there are upwards of 600M Android device accounts. Google searches (>94% by volume of all searches) are performed with Google voice processing in India at a higher rate than in any other country with support for many languages and dialects. Regulators are challenging Alphabet/Google's position in the Indian Internet. The next post will review the Meta/Facebook apps such as Facebook Pay, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Look for it at www.ekalore.com/india-business
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