Jio Platforms will open bidding for what’s set to be India’s largest-ever initial public offering on October 21, according to a company filing, with the subscription window closing October 23 and shares expected to start trading October 28. The topline numbers are enormous by any measure — globally: the company is set to price its shares at ₹1,065 to ₹1,119 rupees apiece, in an offering that would raise about $3.2 billion at the upper end of the price band, valuing the company at ₹10.3 trillion rupees, or roughly $108 billion.
This IPO offering would make Jio bigger than any company that has ever listed on an Indian exchange, eclipsing Hyundai Motor India’s 2024 offering.
The valuation Jio is pricing at is still slightly lower than what was talked about before — initially, the company was thought to be going ahead with a valuation of approximately ₹11 lakh crore, and at some point estimations put the potential valuation between a staggering $130 billion and $170 billion. Even sell-side analysts were more bullish than the final pricing suggests: Motilal Oswal Financial Services valued Jio Platforms at between $115 billion and $118 billion back in June. Landing at $107-$108 billion is Reliance choosing a conservative number designed to guarantee a strong debut rather than risk a wobble at a more aggressive price. Early signs suggest that’s working — the grey market premium was at ₹212 per share as of October 13, a roughly 19% premium over the expected upper price band. Bloomberg reports indicated the anchor book alone is expected to draw bids over $20 billion.
The deal is also a generational marker for the Ambani family as much as a financial one. Akash Ambani, the 34-year-old managing director of Jio Platforms and son of Mukesh Ambani, has been leading the deal, making this effectively his introduction to public markets as the executive now running Reliance’s digital crown jewel. It’s a notable handoff moment dressed up as a routine listing.
The company will offer 270 million shares in the IPO, a fresh issue rather than existing shareholders cashing out, with proceeds earmarked largely for debt repayment. Reliance isn’t using this listing to let early backers exit — Meta and Google, which count among Jio’s major foreign investors, aren’t selling into this offering. They bought in during 2020, when Jio Platforms raised more than $20.5 billion from 13 global investors in exchange for roughly 33% of the company, at a valuation between $57 billion and $65 billion.
Jio, launched in 2016, upended India’s telecom sector with free voice and data plans that gave many Indians their first access to platforms like YouTube and Facebook, and Reliance Jio Infocomm is now the country’s largest telecom player with 524 million subscribers and 60% of India’s data traffic. That subscriber base, plus Jio’s expansion into cloud computing, entertainment and AI services, is what the IPO is actually asking public investors to buy into — a bet that the company that rewired how India gets online can now do the same for cloud and AI infrastructure, at a price Reliance has clearly decided to keep humble rather than heroic.