American private equity giant Silver Lake Partners has bought 1 percent of Jio Platforms for Rs 5,655.75 crore ($750 million). This is in a deal that values the digital unit of Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) at $65 billion. The deal comes less than two weeks after Facebook spent $5.7 billion to buy a 9.99 percent stake in Jio. The Facebook-Jio deal was the social media network’s biggest since its $22 billion buyout of WhatsApp in 2014.
After selling a 10% stake to Facebook, Reliance had last week said it was in talks with other strategic and financial investors for a similar-sized deal to cut down debt.
RIL chairman and managing director Mukesh Ambani said, “Silver Lake is one of the most respected voices in technology and finance. We are excited to leverage insights from their global technology relationships for the Indian Digital Society’s transformation.”
Silver Lake co-CEO and managing partner Egon Durban said, “Jio Platforms is one of the world’s most remarkable companies, led by an incredibly strong and entrepreneurial management team. They have brought extraordinary engineering capabilities to bear on bringing the power of low-cost digital services to a mass consumer and small businesses population. The market potential they are addressing is enormous.”
The American private equity giant Silver Lake is the global leader in large-scale technology investing. Its mission is to build and grow great companies by partnering with world-class management teams. Its investments have included Airbnb, Alibaba, Ant Financial, Alphabet’s Verily and Waymo units, Dell Technologies, Twitter and numerous other global technology leaders.
Also Read: Facebook Buys 9.99 Per Cent Stake In Reliance Jio