India’s Bharti and UK win auction for satellite operator OneWeb: Report

KOLKATA: A consortium of India’s Bharti Enterprises and the UK government has won a bid to take over OneWeb, offering to invest $1 billion (Rs 7,465 crore) in the British firm that went bankrupt while trying to build a constellation of satellites to deliver wireless broadband globally.

The two partners will invest $500 million each in OneWeb, which aims to provide high-speed, low-latency broadband services, especially in rural areas, and take on the likes of Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starlink and Jeff Bezos’s Amazon-linked Project Kuiper.

The British government will take a significant equity share in OneWeb, UK business secretary Alok Sharma said in a statement. Bharti, he said, would provide commercial and operational leadership, and bring OneWeb a revenue base to contribute towards its future success.