Mumbai-based Jio Platforms, a telecoms company backed by Meta Platforms and Google, is set to float on the stock market from Wednesday, with shares offered to retail investors from that day and the IPO closing on Friday.
The company set a price range of 1,065 rupees to 1,119 rupees a share, offering up to 270m new shares. At the top end of the range, Jio would be worth 10.3tn rupees, making it India's fourth-largest company behind parent Reliance Industries, Bharti Airtel and HDFC Bank. That valuation is more than double the 4.9tn-rupee valuation in 2020, when Meta and Google invested in the company, but well below initial expectations of more than £110bn when the telecoms group posted a draft prospectus in the summer. The lower valuation comes amid a broader stock market slowdown in India, with the blue chip Nifty 50 index down more than 12% this year.
Jio secured 212 anchor investors on Monday before its IPO, including major global fund managers such as BlackRock, Singapore's sovereign wealth fund, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Fidelity Investments, Schroders, JP Morgan Asset Management, Franklin Templeton, Invesco and Prudential.
The family-owned conglomerate Reliance Industries has been encouraging its 400,000-plus employees to buy shares, offering them a discount of 54 rupees a share.
Jio, set up a decade ago as a subsidiary of Reliance Industries and led by Akash Ambani, the oldest son of patriarch Mukesh, offers low-cost broadband to millions of Indians. It launched its telecoms services in September 2016, gained 16 million subscribers in the first month, and topped 100 million subscribers within 170 days, according to Reliance Industries. It is credited with making mobile internet more affordable by triggering a price war.
The company intends to expand further into artificial intelligence, cloud computing and digital infrastructure. Isha Ambani, who sits on Jio's board as a director, told investors last week that the business idea was sparked by poor connectivity she and her brother Akash faced when they returned to India on a break from studying in the US in about 2009-10. She struggled to submit a college assignment online because the internet was not working. "What followed was a conversation about why should India be left behind," she said. "Akash firmly believed that the answer and solution to this was creating a digital technology platform company."