Warren Buffett to invest $300m in India’s Paytm

India’s largest mobile payments group, Paytm is to get $300m investment from Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway.

The investment in One97 Communications signals Mr Buffett growing more comfortable with new technology and payments companies through Berkshire’s holdings in Apple and Visa.

Paytm founded by a 40-year-old, Indian entrepreneur Vijay Shekhar Sharma, ranked as India’s youngest billionaire in 2017 by the Forbes with a net worth of £1.014 billion, has already attracted investors from SoftBank, the Japanese investment group and Alibaba , the Chinese ecommerce company. Paytm offers several services including mobile payments, bill payments and has recently opened an online market place. Sharma, born in Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, inspired by Jack Ma of Alibaba and Masayoshi son of SoftBank, started college at Delhi College of Engineering at the age of 20, while in college, started a website indiasite.net and sold it two years later for $1million. In 2000 he started One97 Communications which offered mobile content like news, cricket scores, ringtones, Jokes and exam results. Which was launched in 2010. He was one of prime critic of Facebook’s Free Basics initiative in India, as being against the principle of net neutrality.

 Digital payments across Asia, led by Alibaba’s Alipay and rival Tencent’s WeChat Pay as both Chinese groups have become leading investors in other payments, internet and online shopping businesses in the region.

Mr Buffett has traditionally avoided tech stocks especially at the cusp of the new millennium during the dotcom boom. More recently he pulled out of IBM and made a big investment in Apple.

 When Prime Minister Narendra Modi removed 86 per cent of India’s cash from circulation in late 2016, giving a special boost to digital payment operators .

 Domestic groups are facing competition from incoming tech giants like Amazon, Google and Facebook.