After Facebook bought 9.99% stakes in Jio by investing $5.7 billion, Microsoft has also decided to invest in one of India’s tech giants – Paytm. According to the Economic Times, after raising $1 billion last year, Paytm is looking to raise an additional $100 million, and Microsoft is going to help the company raise that amount.
According to the report, talks with Microsoft began last year when Paytm was in the middle of raising funds. Unfortunately, Microsoft couldn’t invest at that time. However, it is “likely to pump in cash now.”
For the financial year ending March 2019, Paytm reported a loss of $549 million. Almost every mobile payment firm in India is not making enough profits. So, one may think that Microsoft isn’t right to invest in India’s mobile payment giant. However, according to a study by ASSOCHAM-PWC, one of the apex trade associations in India, the country’s digital payment industry will make $135.2 billion by 2023.
Also, Microsoft isn’t a newcomer when it comes to making strategic partnerships with India’s tech companies. Before this, Microsoft made a cloud-related deal with Flipkart, an eCommerce giant owned by Walmart. In the agreement, Microsoft permitted the use of Azure as an exclusive public cloud platform by Flipkart.
Also, last year, India’s communication giant, Reliance Jio, signed a deal with Microsoft to build new custom solutions for large enterprises on Azure. In addition to that, Jio leveraged Microsoft’s language cognitive services to provide support for 13 Indian languages on its device ecosystem.
