Jio soars 21% on debut as India's No. 2 firm
Shares in Jio Platforms soared 21% on their stock market debut in Mumbai on Wednesday, making the Reliance Industries telecoms and digital group India's second-largest listed company, valued at about $131.5 billion. The listing is the first for the Reliance conglomerate in two decades and caps India's biggest-ever initial public offering.
A record IPO and a flying start
Jio Platforms opened at 1,358 rupees a share on the National Stock Exchange, against an offer price of 1,119 rupees, a premium of 21.36%. The shares also began trading on the Bombay Stock Exchange. The public offering raised about 30,213 crore rupees, roughly $3.2 billion. Demand was heavy from the outset, with bids covering the shares on offer within two hours of subscription opening on 21 October. By market value, Jio overtook telecoms rival Bharti Airtel and HDFC Bank, leaving only parent Reliance Industries ahead of it.
What Jio is, and why the debut matters
Jio's telecoms business serves more than 530 million customers, a single-country subscriber base second only to China Mobile, and the group is backed by Meta Platforms and Alphabet's Google. Its businesses span mobile connectivity, fixed broadband, enterprise services, cloud and digital platforms. The listing ceremony in Mumbai was attended by members of the Ambani family, including Mukesh Ambani's eldest son Akash, Jio's managing director. For Mukesh Ambani, Asia's richest person according to Forbes, the debut advances a long-running plan to reshape Reliance from an oil-and-chemicals conglomerate into a consumer and technology group, as well as a succession plan designed to avoid a repeat of the public feud with his younger brother Anil that followed their father Dhirubhai's death in 2002 without a will.
