India’s largest IPO

India’s digital revolution did not begin in a boardroom. It began the day millions of Indians discovered that the internet was no longer a luxury they had to ration.

For a college student watching videos on a crowded suburban train, a small-town shopkeeper accepting digital payments, a grandmother video-calling her grandchildren or a young job-seeker searching for opportunities, affordable data changed the rules of everyday life.

Suddenly, the smartphone became more than a telephone. It was a classroom, cinema, marketplace, newsroom and window to the world. And Jio was at the heart of that transformation.

When Reliance Jio entered the telecom market in 2016, it did not merely offer another mobile connection. It challenged the economics of connectivity itself. Cheap data, aggressive pricing and a nationwide network triggered a price war that forced the industry to reinvent itself. Consumers gained, competitors scrambled and the internet travelled deeper into India than ever before.

A decade later, Jio stands at another defining moment. With more than 524 million customers as of March 2026, the digital giant is preparing to enter the stock market, taking its ambitions beyond connectivity into broadband, digital services and artificial intelligence. The proposed IPO will test not just investor appetite for India’s largest digital platform, but also the market’s ability to price a business that has helped reshape how a nation lives, works and communicates.

The next chapter will be written by a younger leadership team, with Akash Ambani at the helm of Jio’s telecom business. The question now is whether Jio can convert its extraordinary reach into the next generation of growth – and justify the enormous expectations accompanying its market debut.

Growth with IPO

The proposed IPO is a pure fresh issue of up to 270 million equity shares. “There is no offer-for-sale component, so the proceeds flow to Jio Platforms rather than to an existing promoter or investor,” says Akash Ambani, adding that up to Rs27,500 crore of the proceeds is earmarked for prepayment of specified borrowings of Reliance Jio Infocomm. The balance is available for general corporate purposes within the disclosed limit.

Jio’s net leverage had already improved from 0.88 times in FY24 to 0.36 times in FY26. Debt repayment through the IPO is intended to reduce financing costs further and strengthen the balance sheet for the next investment cycle.

The Jio Platforms IPO opens for public subscription from 21 to 23 October 2026. The issue size is up to Rs30,213 crore, comprising a fresh issue of 270 million shares, at a price band of Rs1,065 to Rs1,119 per share (face value: Rs10). The lot size is 12 shares, with a minimum retail investment of Rs13,428 at the upper price band. The shares will be listed on the BSE and NSE.

Brokerages are backing the Jio Platforms IPO, citing strong earnings growth, cash flows and digital expansion. Kotak Mahindra Bank founder Uday Kotak has described Jio as a one-of-a-kind business and says “Its valuation looks attractive relative to its peers. At the upper end of the proposed IPO price band, Jio is valued at 34 times its FY26 earnings, compared with 41 times for peers, according to the figures shared. The comparison offers a perspective on how Jio’s proposed valuation stacks up against other businesses in the sector as investors assess the upcoming listing”.

Shriram Research giving a “subscribe” rating is recommended for the Jio Platforms IPO for investors with a medium to long-term investment horizon. At the upper price band, the issue is valued reasonably at a P/E multiple of 33.3x (discount to Bharti Airtel’s 40.71x), which is well-supported by Jio’s undisputed market leadership and consistent double-digit EBITDA growth. The company stands out as a core structural compounder for India’s digital economy, underpinned by robust cash generation, declining leverage as IPO proceeds are utilised to repay debt, and rapid adoption of home broadband services. Looking ahead, revenue and profitability are poised for sustained expansion driven by ongoing ARPU hikes, 2G-to-4G/5G subscriber migration, deepening enterprise relationships, and the potential export of its proprietary in-house tech stack to overseas operators. While regulatory and competitive risks remain, the structural health of the industry and the strength of an integrated digital ecosystem make this an attractive, high-conviction opportunity for medium to long-term investors.

Equity analyst Sunil Pachisia says: “For listing gains, Jio Platforms IPO has strong brand recognition, market leadership and investor interest, but listing gains are not guaranteed. Apply only if the IPO valuation, subscription trends and prevailing market sentiment support the price. Avoid relying solely on grey-market premium; if the issue is heavily oversubscribed or if GMP declines, listing gains may be limited or turn negative.”

He adds: “For a 3-5-year holding, Jio offers long-term growth potential through 5G, tariff increases, home broadband and digital services, supported by growing revenue and profits. However, the IPO valuation is relatively demanding, so returns will depend on sustained earnings growth and cash generation.”

His view is to consider a measured investment rather than a large allocation, while monitoring quarterly results, average revenue per user (ARPU), capital expenditure and return on capital. If the listing price rises sharply above the IPO price, waiting for a more reasonable entry valuation may be prudent.

Pachisia remains positive about Jio’s long-term prospects, supported by its market leadership, large subscriber base and growth opportunities. The price band of Rs1,065-R1,119 implies a valuation of around Rs10.3 lakh crore. The reported grey-market premium indicates positive listing expectations, but it is unofficial and can change sharply.

Jio offers a credible growth story through 5G, tariff increases, AirFiber, broadband, enterprise services and digital technologies. Revenue and profits are growing, but the IPO valuation is demanding, and continued capital expenditure could affect returns. “My view is to consider a measured investment for the long term, provided earnings growth justifies the valuation. Investors seeking a better margin of safety may prefer to wait until after listing and assess the market price before entering. The investment decision should be based on valuation and future earnings, not merely the strength of the Jio brand. Also remember, ‘market is supreme’ and always gives opportunities, so do not regret not applying if you miss out on listing gains or are not allotted shares because of oversubscription.”

Deven Choksey, promoter & MD DRChoksey FinServ Pvt Ltd.  is also positive about the IPO. He says: “It will be among the top five companies by market capitalisation after listing, and within six months the company will qualify for MSCI and derivatives-market trading. Those investors who invested in 2022 can exit. Second, the company is growing at a compound rate of 20 per cent, and over the next 4 years, EBITDA could double from Rs72,000 crore to Rs1,50,000 crore. With a market capitalisation of Rs10 lakh crore, they are leaving 20 per cent upside for investors after listing.” 

Between April and July 2020, 13 strategic and financial investors invested Rs1,52,056 crore in Jio Platforms.

These included Meta, Google, KKR, Silver Lake, Vista Equity Partners, General Atlantic, TPG, Mubadala, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.

The Genesis

Before FY16, India’s mobile connectivity market was fragmented, with close to 10 active operators, yet digital access remained scarce. Monthly data usage per customer stood below 0.2 GB, and the average cost per GB was Rs228. Some 87.20 per cent of customers were on 2G networks, while smartphone penetration stood at a modest 20-25 per cent. Total mobile broadband customers numbered 132.2 million, of whom fewer than 10 million were on 4G.

India ranked 155th in the world in mobile broadband penetration, according to Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries, at the company’s 43rd AGM on 21 July 2017. At launch, Jio was among the first greenfield all-IP operators globally to roll out 4G voice using VoLTE technology at scale in India, at a time when other operators were still transitioning from 2G and 3G networks.

Jio crossed 100 million customers in less than 170 days after its commercial launch, becoming the first company in India to reach this milestone. By September 2017, within a year of its launch, Jio had achieved a 42.67 per cent share of India’s broadband customers. Within 3 years of Jio’s launch, industry-wide data usage had surged more than 50-fold, establishing India as one of the world’s largest mobile data markets

Today, Jio is India’s largest digital connectivity and fixed-broadband provider, with 524.4 million customers, including 268.5 million 5G users and 27.1 million fixed-broadband customers. The technology-adoption gap has narrowed sharply. While the transition to 3G took nearly a decade, approximately 41 per cent of mobile broadband customers had shifted to 5G within 4 years of its commercial launch in 2022.

Digital payments

Digital payments are among the areas that have changed most significantly since Jio’s entry. The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) was launched in April 2016, the same year Jio arrived, but took years to gain traction. By FY19, UPI had around 80 million users. By FY25, that number had soared to roughly 556 million, while the volume of digital transactions in the country rose from about 23 billion to around 282 billion over the same period, making India the world’s largest real-time payments market.

Streaming and entertainment habits have changed just as dramatically. The number of Indians using over-the-top (OTT) video platforms grew from roughly 30 million in FY16 to about 275 million by FY19 and around 601 million by FY25, turning what was once a novelty into one of the most common ways Indians spend their evenings.

Rural India has also witnessed a sharp expansion in internet access. Rural internet users climbed from 227.0 million in FY19 to 434.3 million by December 2025, more than doubling in under 6 years as affordable smartphones and cheap data reached villages that had previously been left out of India’s digital connectivity story.

In FY26, approximately 60 per cent of India’s wireless data traffic ran on Jio’s network. Jio had approximately 1.4 times as many 4G and 5G subscribers as the second-largest operator in India. Smartphone penetration among mobile customers rose to approximately 70-75 per cent, from around 20-25 per cent in FY16. The entry-level JioBharat smart feature phone, priced at Rs799, combines 4G connectivity with UPI, video and music. It is designed to help approximately 263.5 million remaining 2G users in India gain access to the digital economy.

Today, India’s digital economy contributes approximately 14 per cent of gross value added (GVA), while average monthly mobile data usage of more than 25 GB is projected to rise to 59.2 GB by FY31. Even newer digital habits, such as cloud gaming, online productivity tools and AI-powered services, rely on the connectivity base that Jio’s entry helped establish. Personal digital productivity and consumer cloud services alone are expected to grow from about R157 billion in FY26 to around Rs428 billion by FY31, as more Indians use their phones for work, storage and artificial intelligence tools.

The shift over the past decade has been stark. Average monthly data usage rose from less than 0.2 GB per customer in FY16 to 42.3 GB among Jio’s wireless data customers in Q4 FY26, while the cost per GB fell from Rs228 to R7.9. Network quality improved alongside affordability. Blended download speeds rose from approximately 2.5 Mbps in January 2016 to more than 68 Mbps by December 2025, while average 5G download speeds exceeded 180 Mbps.

Jio carried approximately 60 per cent of India’s wireless data traffic in FY26. Total traffic on its network reached 241 exabytes during the year, placing it among the world’s largest data operators.

Fixed broadband has become Jio’s second connectivity engine. As of 31 March 2026, JioFiber and JioAirFiber together served 27.1 million customers and held a 42.60 per cent market share. Jio contributed 67.56 per cent of the sector’s net additions during FY26. JioAirFiber served about 13 million homes by the end of FY26 and was adding up to 60,000 connections a day. More than 90 per cent of installations were completed within 24 hours.

The next stage of home connectivity combines broadband with services, including more than 1,000 television channels, 15 OTT services, cloud computing through JioPC and an expanding smart-home proposition.

On solid ground

Jio’s financial scale in FY26 was reflected in revenue from operations of Rs1,46,885 crore, EBITDA of Rs76,255 crore, an EBITDA margin of 51.9 per cent and profit after tax of Rs30,049 crore.

In 2019, Jio entered a long-term alliance with Microsoft to combine its data-centre infrastructure with Microsoft Azure for Indian enterprises and developers.

Meta became Jio Platforms’ largest external shareholder, with a stake of 9.98 per cent. Google invested Rs33,737 crore for a 7.73 per cent stake – its first and largest investment under the Google for India Digitisation Fund. Meta and Google subsequently became operating partners as well. Their relationships with Jio now extend into AI, consumer services, enterprise solutions and devices.

AI revolution

In 2025, Reliance announced Reliance Intelligence as a new group-level growth engine for AI infrastructure, platforms and services. Just as Jio made high-speed data available to everyone, everywhere, Reliance Intelligence aims to make AI available to everyone, everywhere.

The company has outlined investment of roughly Rs10 lakh crore in multi-gigawatt, AI-ready data centres, beginning with a sovereign AI compute backbone in Jamnagar powered by Reliance’s renewable energy. The first 120 MW was scheduled for commissioning by the end of 2026.

Jio’s partnership with Google gives hundreds of millions of Jio users access to Google AI Pro, powered by Gemini. Its partnership with Meta brings open-source Llama models to Indian enterprises through sovereign hosting and lower-cost AI services. JioBrain, Jio’s in-house AI and machine-learning platform, is used for network automation, faster operational decisions and customer engagement, adding an intelligence layer to its connectivity infrastructure.

If Jio’s first decade reduced the cost of connectivity, its second aims to reduce the cost of computing and AI inference. Jio is a technology platform built on proprietary digital technology, with pan-India connectivity as its foundation. Connectivity is therefore the base of the business, not its full definition.

Its vertically integrated technology stack spans a combined 4G and 5G core, cloud-native network architecture, operations support systems (OSS) and business support systems (BSS), radios, UBR-based fixed wireless access, customer-premises equipment, devices, operating systems, applications and AI-driven network automation.

Owning the stack reduces dependence on external vendors, creates structural cost advantages and enables faster innovation cycles. It also allows the technology to be configured for specific enterprise and international requirements. The device and software layer includes JioBharat, 5G radios, the Jio set-top box, JioFrames, Jio TeleOS and JioBharat OS. Jio has also opened the JioBharat device platform to external manufacturers such as Karbonn.

The network is supported by more than 1 million route-km of fibre, more than 100 edge nodes and fixed-broadband availability across approximately 98 per cent of Indian pincodes.

Jio Platforms and its subsidiaries had filed 6,817 patents: 2,393 in India and 4,424 abroad. Of these, 1,009 had been granted across India and overseas markets, spanning 4G, 5G, 6G, AI and other digital technologies.

Jio moved from 340th to 20th place in a single year in the WIPO-linked ranking for the velocity of innovation through patents. It was the only Indian company in the global top 20.

Looking ahead, Jio plans to deploy its 5G, fixed-wireless and AI technologies overseas through local-operator partnerships, managed-services arrangements and, where appropriate, strategic greenfield deployments. It is also evaluating a sovereign low Earth orbit (LEO) constellation, leasing capacity from global providers for early availability while building ground-station infrastructure in India.

The growth runway spans 5G migration, fixed-broadband penetration, enterprise digitisation, AI and cloud services, premium connectivity, international technology partnerships and satellite broadband.

Box

Late entrant to market leader

Jio ushers in India’s digital economy with technology-led disruption of the telecom industry

When Jio entered India’s telecom market in 2016, it was the 14th operator in an intensely competitive industry. Established players had already built their networks and customer bases and mobile data remained expensive and limited in reach. Jio chose to challenge the market not by following the existing model but by building a technology platform designed to make digital connectivity affordable and accessible to millions of Indians.

Recalling the origins of Jio, Isha Ambani (member, executive leadership & board, Reliance Jio) explained that a frustrating experience with unreliable internet while she was a student prompted a larger question: “Why should India be left behind?” The answer, she said, was to build a digital technology platform company from scratch. That vision shaped Jio’s entry into the market and its long-term ambition.

Jio changed the industry’s economics through affordable data, free voice calls, rapid network expansion and a focus on customer experience. When speaking at a recent media conference, Akash Ambani, MD, Jio Platforms, recalled that data cost about Rs228 per GB, when Jio entered the market. Today, he said, Jio’s price per GB is about Rs4.90, while its customers consume an average of 43.7 GB per month. Jio’s journey has been marked by sustained investment, continuous innovation and the effort to deliver on its customer promises year after year.

The market has changed dramatically since Jio’s entry. India’s telecom industry has consolidated from 14 operators to four major players, making it a highly competitive market in which scale, network quality, technology and customer experience are critical. Yet, Jio has emerged as the leader. As of 30 June 2026, it served 533.3 million customers, including 284.9 million 5G customers, held about 50 per cent of India’s wireless broadband subscriber market and carried more than 60 per cent of the country’s wireless data traffic.

Jio’s success is not confined to mobile connectivity. In fixed broadband, it had 27.1 million customers and a 42.60 per cent market share in 2025-26, compared with 22.71 per cent for Bharti Airtel. It held a 77.49 per cent share of the 5G- and UBR-based fixed wireless access segment, demonstrating how its technology and execution have helped it establish a strong position in home broadband.

The differentiator is that Jio is a technology company, not merely a telecom operator. It has developed its own end-to-end technology stack in-house, spanning its 4G and 5G core, network software, operating systems, devices and digital applications. As of 30 June 2026, it had filed 7,220 patent applications across areas including 4G, 5G, 6G, cloud-native networks and AI-driven automation. This technological capability gives Jio greater control over innovation and creates opportunities to build new services beyond connectivity.

Jio’s next opportunity extends beyond India. Its in-house technology stack, proven at scale in one of the world’s most demanding markets, could be offered to telecom operators in developed as well as developing countries. Akash Ambani described the approach as partnering with operators as an end-to-end managed-services provider, rather than simply selling hardware or software. “The company sees a huge market opportunity all across the world, including the developed and developing nations,” he affirmed. Such partnerships could open new revenue streams by taking Indian-developed technology to global markets.

Jio Platforms’ IPO comprises 270 million fresh equity shares priced Rs1,065-1,119 per share. The issue opens on 21 October and closes on 23 October 2026, with listing expected on 28 October. The issue size ranges from about Rs28,755 crore to Rs30,213 crore, implying a post-issue market capitalisation of, say, Rs9.81 lakh crore to Rs10.30 lakh crore. Of the proceeds, Rs27,500 crore is intended for prepayment or repayment of borrowings of Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited, with the balance allocated to general corporate purposes.

The Rs8,110-crore anchor book attracted reported institutional bids of about Rs2.5 lakh crore – more than 30 times the amount on offer. It was reported as the first Indian IPO to attract anchor-book bids exceeding Rs2.5 lakh crore, with participation from global asset managers, sovereign wealth funds, domestic mutual funds and insurers.

Several brokerages that have published research on the IPO have recommended subscribing to the issue, citing Jio’s market leadership, earnings growth, technology capabilities and opportunities in broadband, enterprise services, AI and international markets. These recommendations reflect the respective brokerages’ assessments and do not guarantee investment returns.

Jio’s story is one of a late entrant challenging an established industry through technology, scale and persistent execution. From making data more accessible to building a proprietary technology platform and exploring global opportunities, Jio has continually expanded the boundaries of its business. Its IPO brings this technology-led growth story to the public markets as the company prepares for its next phase.