Investors pile into Ambani’s Jio IPO as bids top 13 times

NEW DELHI: Subscriptions for India’s biggest stock listing ever surged further on the final day of bidding on Friday, as investors bet on Jio Platforms’.2 billion offering to tap into the nation’s telecom and digital sector.

Billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s first initial public offering in two decades is being closely watched as a test of investor appetite for large listings when AI-linked stocks are facing increased scrutiny. Jio, whose mobile network serves more than 500 million users, is launching its initial public offering during the auspicious Hindu festive season.

The Jio IPO has received more than 12 million applications, the most ever in India, said a Reliance official familiar with the matter. In contrast, Chinese memory chip giant CXMT’s $8.6 billion IPO, the biggest in Asia this year, attracted investments from around 9.4 million accounts.

India’s Jio IPO opens for public bids in record $3.2 billion sale

Reliance seen as long-term wealth generator

Public subscriptions for Jio’s IPO have exceeded 13 times the shares on offer, driven by strong demand from institutional and retail investors, employees and shareholders. If bids were largely placed near the 1,119-rupee ($11.79) top of the IPO’s price band, demand exceeds $30.5 billion.

That is on top of so-called anchor investors like the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, BlackRock and Fidelity that bid for their quotas on Monday. Their reserved $854 million worth of shares received bids of over $25 billion.

“This is a Reliance IPO after a long time, which is triggering a lot of exuberance and euphoria for the stock,” said Kranthi Bathini, equity strategist at WealthMills Securities.

The IPO values Jio Platforms at up to $108.3 billion, potentially making it one of India’s biggest companies by market capitalisation when trading starts ​on Wednesday.

Jio, led by Ambani’s eldest son, Akash Ambani, counts Meta Platforms and Alphabet’s Google among its old investors.

The IPO got off to an unusually rapid start on Wednesday, when the offering was fully subscribed within two hours of opening.

That contrasts with most Indian IPOs, where books typically build gradually and institutional investors often wait until the final hours to place bids.

Jio is part of Ambani’s Reliance Industries, a company often seen by Indian investors as a long-term wealth generator. Reliance shares have returned around 900% since 2006, beating the benchmark Nifty index’s 685% return, LSEG data shows.

Jio’s telecoms business, launched in 2016, disrupted the market by offering free voice and data, hitting rivals Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea. Today, on the ​basis of customers in a single country, Jio’s 500 million-plus users are second only to China Mobile’s.

As of Friday, the institutional portion of the IPO was subscribed 35 times, underscoring strong demand from large investors. The retail tranche was covered 2.48 times, while bids for the employee and existing Reliance shareholder quotas reached 2.77 and 7.16 times the shares on offer, respectively, exchange data showed.

Reliance was founded by Dhirubhai Ambani, Akash Ambani’s grandfather, who cultivated a vast retail investor base through mass shareholder gatherings in Mumbai in the 1980s. On its website, the conglomerate says its 1977 listing helped popularise equity investing in India, “ushering the equity cult” in the country.