Private-equity firm Silver Lake has struck a deal to invest $750 million in Indian telecommunications and technology giant Jio Platforms Ltd., the company said early Monday India time.
The deal, which was reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal, comes less than two weeks after
Facebook Inc.
said it would pay $5.7 billion for a nearly 10% stake in Jio, a subsidiary of Indian conglomerate
Reliance Industries Ltd.
Silver Lake’s investment values Jio at $65 billion—a 12.5% premium to the value implied by the Facebook investment, which came with a separate agreement to connect the social-media giant’s WhatsApp messaging app with parts of the Jio platform.
The infusion will help fuel the breakneck growth of Jio, which was built from scratch starting in late 2016 and has become a major wireless operator in India, serving nearly 400 million customers. The company has also built its own phones and has created an ecosystem of digital applications for video and music-streaming, chatting, e-commerce and more.
Jio has employed a strategy of undercutting rivals’ pricing to bring connectivity and digital services to a wider swath of India’s population of more than 1.3 billion. The company, which would have annual revenue of $8 billion based on its first-quarter sales and has operating margins of greater than 40%, is considered a prime candidate for an eventual initial public offering, according to people familiar with the matter.
Silver Lake has arguably been the most active investor in private and public tech companies this year, with the pace undiminished by the coronavirus pandemic.
A deal with Jio would be Silver Lake’s third major investment in just the past four weeks as the technology-focused buyout firm seeks bargains amid the economic destruction the pandemic has caused.
On April 6, the firm with a partner invested $1 billion in Airbnb Inc., which has been battered by a wave of cancellations due to the pandemic. Two weeks later, Silver Lake joined with
in a roughly $1.2 billion rescue-financing deal for online-travel booking company
Expedia Group Inc.,
whose revenue has also been severely dented by travel bans. In March, Silver Lake agreed to make a $1 billion investment in
Twitter Inc.,
which was facing an onslaught from activist investor Elliott Management Corp.
With around $40 billion in assets, Silver Lake has a longstanding playbook of taking large stakes in companies including
Dell Technologies Inc.,
Motorola Solutions Inc.
and
Broadcom Inc.
and working closely with their founders or management to help spur growth.
With Jio, Silver Lake is hoping to replicate the success of its investment in
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.,
which earned the firm a big return when the Chinese e-commerce giant went public in 2014.
That was followed by a 2018 investment in Alibaba carve-out Ant Financial Services Group, which has yet to go public.
In March, Silver Lake led a $2.25 billion funding round in
Alphabet Inc.’s
Waymo LLC, becoming one of the first outside investors in the self-driving-car unit. The firm also led a $1 billion investment in Alphabet’s Verily Life Sciences LLC in January.
Based in Mumbai, Jio-parent Reliance Industries is India’s largest company by market value and has investments in media, retail and petrochemicals. Reliance’s chairman and largest shareholder, Mukesh Ambani, is the country’s richest man. The company placed much of its digital and telecommunications assets in the newly created Jio Platforms last year.
Jio tapped
known for its deep ties to Silicon Valley, to lead the fundraising effort.
Write to Miriam Gottfried at Miriam.Gottfried@wsj.com
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