Jio Platforms’ much-awaited initial public offering opens for subscription today, October 21, putting India’s largest telecom and digital-services business directly in front of public-market investors for the first time.
The Jio Platforms IPO price band has been fixed at ₹1,065 to ₹1,119 per share. At the upper end, the fresh issue could raise about ₹30,213 crore and value Jio Platforms at roughly ₹10.3 lakh crore, or around $108 billion. That would make it India’s biggest IPO by issue size.
The issue closes on October 23. For retail investors, one lot contains 12 shares, meaning the minimum investment at the upper price band is ₹13,428.
Jio Is Selling 27 Crore New Shares
The IPO consists entirely of fresh shares rather than an offer for sale by existing investors.
Jio Platforms is issuing approximately 27 crore equity shares with a face value of ₹10 each. That means existing shareholders such as Reliance Industries, Meta and Google are not using the IPO to sell part of their stakes.
This distinction matters.
When an IPO contains an offer for sale, some of the money raised goes to existing shareholders who are exiting or reducing their holdings. With a fresh issue, the proceeds go to the company itself.
Jio plans to use a large portion of the ₹30,000 crore Jio IPO proceeds to repay or prepay borrowings at telecom subsidiary Reliance Jio Infocomm, with the balance available for general corporate purposes.
The Valuation Could Reach ₹10.3 Lakh Crore
At ₹1,119 per share, Jio Platforms would be valued at around ₹10.3 lakh crore.
That immediately places the company among India’s largest listed businesses by market capitalisation.
It is a sizeable valuation, but Jio is also entering the market with scale few newly listed companies can match.
The company had around 533.3 million subscribers as of June 30, 2026, and handles close to 60% of India’s mobile data traffic. Its operations now stretch well beyond wireless telecom into home broadband, enterprise connectivity, cloud infrastructure and artificial intelligence.
That wider business mix is important because investors are not simply valuing a mobile operator.
They are being asked to value the broader Jio Platforms digital business.
Retail Investors Get 35% of the Issue
The offer follows the standard book-building structure.
Around 50% of the issue has been reserved for qualified institutional buyers, 35% for retail investors and 15% for non-institutional investors.
Eligible Reliance Industries shareholders also have a reserved portion, while Jio employees are receiving a ₹54-per-share discount on their allocation.
For an employee bidding at the top of the price band, that brings the effective price down to ₹1,065 per share.
Public bidding remains open until October 23. The allotment is expected to be finalised on October 26, with shares scheduled to list on the BSE and NSE on October 28.
Anchor Investors Have Already Put In ₹8,110 Crore
Institutional demand was strong even before the public portion opened.
Jio raised approximately ₹8,109.84 crore from 212 anchor investor accounts and schemes on October 19.
The shares were allotted at ₹1,119, the top end of the IPO price band.
Investors included BlackRock, Fidelity Investments, Capital Group, GIC, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, JPMorgan Asset Management and Life Insurance Corporation of India.
Demand for the anchor portion reportedly reached about ₹2.5 lakh crore, more than 30 times the shares available.
That does not guarantee how the public issue or eventual listing will perform. It does, however, show that large domestic and international institutions wanted substantially more Jio stock than they were able to receive in the anchor allocation.
Jio Has Become Much More Than a Telecom Company
Jio’s starting point remains connectivity.
The company changed India’s telecom market after its commercial launch in 2016 by combining a nationwide 4G network with inexpensive data and free voice calls.
A decade later, it has more than half a billion subscribers.
Home broadband is now becoming another growth engine through JioFiber and JioAirFiber, while the company has also moved deeper into enterprise technology.
AI is being added across several parts of the platform.
Managing Director Akash Ambani has said Jio’s future growth should come from multiple engines rather than relying only on mobile tariffs. Those include mobile services, home broadband, enterprise solutions and AI-enabled digital platforms.
That strategy is central to the Jio IPO valuation.
A mature mobile operator can still generate large amounts of cash, but investors normally assign higher growth expectations to businesses that can sell additional services to the same customer base.
Jio Still Has Room to Earn More Per Customer
Scale alone does not settle the investment case.
One area investors are likely to watch closely is average revenue per user, or ARPU.
Jio has historically prioritised affordability and subscriber growth. That helped it build enormous scale, but competitors such as Bharti Airtel have often generated more revenue per customer.
Jio now has to show how it can increase monetisation without undermining the low-cost positioning that helped it grow.
5G is part of that equation.
So are home broadband, cloud, enterprise services and digital products.
If customers gradually use more paid services inside the Jio ecosystem, revenue can rise without depending entirely on steep mobile tariff increases.
The Financial Base Is Already Large
Jio enters the market as a profitable business rather than a loss-making technology company promising earnings years into the future.
For the financial year ended March 2026, the company generated about $15.5 billion in revenue and $3.2 billion in profit, according to Reuters. Telecom services still produce the overwhelming majority of earnings.
The challenge is whether newer areas can eventually become meaningful profit contributors too.
Cloud computing and AI require continued investment. Broadband expansion needs infrastructure. Satellite communications, another area Jio is pursuing, will need capital and regulatory approvals before becoming a large commercial business.
That means public investors are buying both a very large existing telecom operation and a collection of growth bets around it.
October 28 Will Be the Next Big Date
For now, attention moves to subscription demand between October 21 and October 23.
The anchor book has already demonstrated strong institutional interest. Retail and non-institutional participation will show whether that enthusiasm extends more broadly.
The Jio Platforms IPO is unusual because the company entering the market is already one of India’s best-known consumer brands and one of its biggest digital businesses.
At the upper price band of ₹1,119, investors are being asked to value that scale at approximately ₹10.3 lakh crore.
The issue closes Friday, allotment is expected on October 26 and trading is scheduled to begin on October 28.
After almost a decade of building Jio largely inside Reliance Industries, the market will finally put a daily public price on the business.
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