Jio Platforms IPO opens 21 October after anchor round; price band Rs 1,065–1,119

Institutional investors bid for many times the shares reserved for them on Monday, 19 October, the opening day of the anchor round in Jio Platforms’ initial public offering. The company has not yet disclosed the anchor order book to the stock exchanges.

Who bid

Global fund houses BlackRock, Fidelity and Capital Group, along with Singapore’s GIC and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, were among the bidders, along with Qatar Investment Authority, Norway’s Norges Bank Investment Management and T. Rowe Price, as well as domestic players such as SBI, ICICI Prudential and HDFC mutual funds and the Life Insurance Corporation of India. The company has not published a final anchor allocation list.

The terms of the issue

Jio Platforms, the Reliance Industries unit that runs the Jio telecom network and the group’s digital businesses, has fixed a price band of Rs 1,065 to Rs 1,119 per share. The offer is entirely a fresh issue of up to 27 crore equity shares, with no existing shareholder selling. At the upper end of the band it would raise about Rs 30,213 crore, which would make it the largest IPO in India’s history by issue size.

The top of the band values the company at about Rs 10.3 lakh crore, or roughly $108 billion. Up to Rs 27,500 crore of the money raised is set aside to repay or prepay borrowings of Reliance Jio Infocomm, the telecom operating arm, with the remainder for general corporate purposes.

According to the draft offer document, Reliance Industries holds 66.43% of Jio Platforms. Meta, through its affiliate Jaadhu Holdings, holds 9.98%, and Google International holds 7.73%. Neither of the two US technology companies is selling shares in the offer.

Context

Jio, led by managing director Akash Ambani, has more than 500 million mobile subscribers and competes with Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea. The valuation, and how Jio plans to earn from its digital services, remain the main questions for investors weighing the issue.

Strong anchor demand indicates institutional interest but does not set the final price, and anchor shares come with a lock-in period after listing.

What happens next

The issue opens for public subscription on Wednesday, 21 October, and closes on Friday, 23 October. The shares are expected to list on the BSE and the National Stock Exchange later this month, after allotment.

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