Facebook's billion dollar investment in Reliance Industries Ltd's (RIL) Jio Platforms is the biggest foreign direct investment (FDI) in the technology sector till date. This along with British Petroleum's (BP) deal will bring down RIL's net debt by approximately 20 percent, said CLSA in its report.
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The US social media giant will be adding Rs 4.62 lakh crore to Jio platforms. As a part of its investment, Facebook will buyback RIL's optionally convertible preference shares (OCPS) while the remaining will directly go as cash to the company.
Also, closure of Rs 70 billion stake sale of BP should imply cash infusion of over Rs 500 billion, bringing down the net debt by 20 percent possibly by the
end of this ongoing quarter, said the brokerage.
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It further noted that the implied valuation is slightly below brokerage's valuation of Jio (4 percent below our enterprise value of Jio) which should help in positioning the firm as a technology company rather than just a telco.
Reliance Retail segment will also benefit from this partnership, the brokerage said, as a commercial partnership has also been signed with WhatsApp, which will boost its upcoming O2O offering.
"Building these inflows will pull down net debt/EBITDA from 2.7x in March FY20 to comfortable levels of 2.1x/1.3x in March FY21/March FY22. The progress in stake sale in tower and fibre InvIT as well as to Aramco may be the other triggers," added CLSA.