Opinion | Google’s India bet
1 min read 13 Jul 2020, 10:20 PM ISTThe money will be pumped in through a mix of equity investments and partnerships, plus other avenues that support the country’s e-infrastracture, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said
PremiumSundar Pichai, chief executive officer of Google Inc., has announced a fund to invest about $10 billion in India over the next 5-7 years. The money will be pumped in through a mix of equity investments and partnerships, plus other avenues that support the country’s e-infrastracture, he said on Monday at a Google event.
The government, which has aggressively wooed foreign investment in recent times, should be pleased by the very size of the commitment. For Google, this is an effort to tap the huge opportunity in a country whose mass market has only just begun to go online. India has been the global e-flavour of the year, it seems, ever since Facebook bought nearly a tenth of Reliance’s telecom and internet business, Jio Platforms, for $5.7 billion this April. Several other investors bought smaller slices of Jio after that. Such has been its lure that analysts began to wonder if less-fancied online ventures would survive against it. Internet successes tend to achieve monopoly power by their very nature, after all. With other big American companies moving in with big bucks, we can hope for a heartening level of cyber-competition. This would be good for everyone
