Google has announced plans to invest up to $1 billion in Bharti Airtel as part of its Google for India Digitisation Fund, according to a press release by Airtel. The equity investment which will see Google pick up a 1.28 per cent stake will be carried out at $700 million at a share price of Rs. 734, the release added. The corpus of $300 million will be kept aside for commercial agreements which will be “identified and agreed on mutually agreeable terms over the course of the next five years”, the company said. It is not clear how the deal will materialise or how Airtel plans to leverage Google's expertise. Airtel CEO Gopal Vittal had revealed in an earnings call last year that the company was in talks with OEM manufacturers, Google, as well as software developers to see how…
