Indian Shopping for Facebook. The company led by Mark Zuckerberg has bought 9,99% of the telecommunications company Jio Platforms by the Reliance Industries group, the largest privately owned Indian company, owned by Mukesh Ambani. Price of the deal: 5,7 billion dollarsapproximately 5,2 billion euros.
This is a strategic acquisition for Facebook that will allow the Menlo Park giant to open up a real prairie in Indian e-commerce, launching a direct challenge to FlipKart – the main operator on the Indian market – and, of course, to Amazon.
Jio Platforms, of which Facebook has become the first minority shareholder, is one of the main Indian telephone operators and boasts about 380 million users. But that's not what caught Zuckerberg's attention. Pushing him to make what represents the second most expensive acquisition ever made by Facebook after WhatsApp (which cost 2014 billion dollars in 22) is JioMart, the e-commerce platform owned by Jio. In fact, in a note, Facebook explains that among the operations envisaged in the short term is that of creating a partnership between "JioMart, Jio's small business initiative" and "WhatsApp to allow people to connect with companies, make purchases and finally purchase products in a seamless mobile experience”.
Simply put, thanks to this nuptials Indian users will be able to buy products directly on WhatsApp, which already has 400 million users in India.
“A marriage between JioMart and WhatsApp services will help reach India's core user base who buy from small shops,” Tarun Pathak, associate director at Counterpoint Research in Hong Kong, told Reuters.
“In the near future, JioMart and WhatsApp will enable nearly 30 million small Indian kirana (grocery) shops to digitally transact with every customer in their neighborhood,” said Mukesh Ambani, CEO of Reliance.
The official confirmation of the operation arrived only a few hours ago, but the news had been in the air since yesterday. Not surprisingly, on the Nasdaq Facebook stock gained 6,72%.
