Mukesh Ambani's Jio to launch record India IPO on October 21

Jio Platforms, the digital arm of billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries, will launch what is expected to be India’s largest initial public offering on October 21, a company filing showed.

Jio Platforms, which counts Meta and Google among its major foreign investors, is set to price its shares at 1,065 to 1,119 rupees apiece, Reuters reported last week. The IPO would raise about $3.2 billion at the upper end of the price band, valuing the company at 10.3 trillion rupees ($108.25 billion).

The company, which has businesses spanning telecoms, cloud computing, entertainment and AI services, will offer 270 million shares in the IPO, according to the filing.

The offer will open next Wednesday and close on Friday. Bidding for anchor investors will take place on Monday.

Ambani’s Jio Platforms eyes record $3.8 billion Indian IPO, sources say

Launched in 2016, Jio upended the Indian telecoms sector by offering free voice and data plans that allowed many Indians to access platforms such as YouTube and Facebook for the first time.

Rivals such as Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea were hit hard and Reliance Jio Infocomm is now the biggest player in the sector with 524 million subscribers and a 60% share of India’s data traffic.

In 2020, Jio Platforms raised more than $20.5 billion from 13 global investors in exchange for equity of roughly 33%, valuing it between $57 billion and $65 billion.