Jio Platforms arrived on the stock market with a force few of the country’s biggest public offerings have managed in recent years. The digital and telecommunications business, which operates India’s largest telecom network by subscriber base, rose 26.7 per cent above its issue price on Wednesday, becoming the country’s second-most-valuable listed company and reshaping the corporate hierarchy in market capitalisation terms.
The shares opened at ₹1,358 apiece on the BSE and the National Stock Exchange, 21.4 per cent above the issue price of ₹1,119. They closed at ₹1,417.35 on the BSE and ₹1,417.50 on the NSE, valuing Jio Platforms at ₹13.05 trillion. That is about 83 per cent of Reliance Industries’ market value.
This debut run also helped Mukesh Ambani’s conglomerate overtake the Tata group in gross market capitalisation of its listed businesses. The Ambani group’s listed companies were worth about ₹30.25 trillion on Wednesday, against ₹25.40 trillion for the Tata conglomerate.
Over the past decade, several of India’s largest initial public offerings (IPOs) have struggled to reward investors on listing day. Jio Platforms’ debut offered a starkly different opening act.
It also overtook Bharti Airtel, whose shares fell 1.55 per cent to ₹1,948.10 apiece, valuing the rival telecom operator at ₹12.16 trillion, about 7 per cent less than Jio. Jio’s price-to-earnings ratio stood at 42x, against Airtel’s 41x. At a market value of roughly $137 billion, Jio ranked fifth among the world’s telecom companies, behind China Mobile, valued at $221 billion.
The offering had already attracted extraordinary demand: Bids reached 22.19 times the shares on offer, while demand across the public issue and anchor-investor placement exceeded ₹7.4 trillion. The company raised ₹30,213 crore through the IPO.
The successful debut, however, came alongside pressure on its parent. Reliance Industries fell 3.19 per cent to ₹1,158, leaving it with a market capitalisation of ₹15.67 trillion, within 1 per cent of its 52-week low.
For the Mukesh Ambani family, the listing marked both a financial milestone and a handover. Launched in July 2016, Jio Platforms is now a decade-old business whose next phase will be shaped by his children — Akash, Isha and Anant.
Akash Ambani, Jio Platforms’ managing director (MD) and also chairman of Reliance Jio Infocomm, cast the debut as the beginning of a longer undertaking. “What Reliance has done for shareholders for nearly 50 years, Jio will continue to do so for the next fifty,” he said after the listing.
He credited his father, Reliance Industries Chairman and MD Mukesh Ambani, and his grandfather, the late Dhirubhai Ambani, with building the foundation on which the business now stands. He and his siblings, he said, would work to make Jio Platforms “bigger, better and more meaningful for India.”
The company’s ambitions extend well beyond telecom. Having spent its first decade bringing hundreds of millions of Indians into digital life through affordable connectivity, Jio wants its next 10 years to encompass artificial intelligence, cloud computing, connected devices, satellite connectivity and digital services “not yet imagined”.
Mukesh Ambani, 69, appeared visibly emotional as his children took centre stage at the listing of the business he had launched. The scene offered a glimpse of the family’s succession taking shape in public, with a corporate empire’s future increasingly tied to its next generation. “My dream is that one day, when the world counts its great technology companies, one of them will be called Jio Platforms Limited. Our promise to India: We will keep building, innovating and pushing boundaries until that dream comes true,” he said.
Isha Ambani, a director of Jio Platforms and a non-executive director of Reliance Industries, placed the listing in a longer history of widening public participation in the family’s businesses. She recalled Reliance’s first public offering in 1977, when it raised ₹2.82 crore at a valuation of ₹10 crore. Dhirubhai Ambani, she said, had wanted ordinary Indian families to participate in the country’s prosperity as owners, not spectators.
“Almost 50 years later, that trust has come full circle,” she said. Isha cited Jio Platforms’ annual revenue of about $15.5 billion and earnings of $8 billion, adding: “Different industries. Different decades. The same faith in India. And this is just the beginning.”
Anant Ambani, also a Jio Platforms director, described the listing as a public trust as much as a corporate achievement. Recalling Dhirubhai’s ambition to bring internet access to every hand and the wider world to every village, he said, “Today, Jio is shared with India.” He credited Isha with sowing the seed of the Jio vision and Akash with making it his own, while acknowledging the customers whose lives the company had touched by connecting classrooms, families, patients and communities. “Jio aapne banaya (you built Jio), he said. “To fulfil your dreams is our dream.”
The next test
For investors, the listing separates Jio Platforms’ market value from the broader Reliance conglomerate, including its larger energy business. The listing sets the stage for an imminent tariff hike in the near term, which according to analysts, could be around 15 per cent.
“After the Jio Platforms IPO and impending Vodafone Idea fundraise, we believe the case for a tariff hike is stronger. However, we now build in a smartphone tariff hike of about 15 per cent from March 2027 versus December 2026 earlier,” said analysts at Motilal Oswal Financial Services, who also termed the listing as a “seminal event” for the Indian telecom sector.
Ambit Capital Research maintained its expectation of a 15 per cent hike in December 2026, followed by biennial increases of about 12 per cent over the next decade. It pointed to Vodafone Idea’s need to raise average revenue per user above ₹300 by FY30 and Reliance’s need to generate dollar-denominated returns of more than 10 per cent for Jio Platforms’ investors. “Third is the industry’s current poor economics — 10 per cent pre-tax RoCE (return on capital employed) in FY26, undershooting cost of capital,” they added.
In the longer term, fading out of unlimited 5G data plans as 5G monetisation will come into focus, said market watchers. Jio Platforms’ advent into the Indian market in 2016 paved the way for free voice calls and unlimited data usage packs as it wanted to get customers on to its then new 4G standalone architecture (SA) network. Now with 540 million customers under its belt, second globally to China Mobile, and bets being placed on AI and data centres, shareholders would look closely at return on capital employed and monetisation, they added.
As 5G penetration rises, analysts expect the focus to shift from acquiring users to monetising consumption. Motilal Oswal Securities said that the discontinuation of unlimited 5G offering could provide near-term tailwind for driving average revenue per user (Arpu) growth, as broader smartphone tariff hikes are awaited.
A family milestone, celebrated at scale
The listing’s celebration extended beyond the trading floor. At Reliance Corporate Park, according to a PTI report citing people familiar with the event, thousands of employees and their families gathered for a party featuring street-food stalls, dance performances and musical sessions blending devotional music with contemporary rhythms.
The company also brought forward employee payments. October salaries were paid on October 15, about a fortnight early, and 75 per cent of annual cash bonuses or performance-linked incentives for FY27 were disbursed on Wednesday, months ahead of the usual post-financial-year payout. The early salary payment was intended to allow employees to bid for shares in the IPO; the accelerated bonus was described as an early Diwali gift.
Akash, who had worn business suits and a bandhgala during investor roadshows and the listing ceremony, changed into a T-shirt to address the gathering. His twin sister, Isha, and younger brother, Anant, stood alongside him again.
He, earlier at the listing event, described the siblings as “three bodies, but one soul”, united by a commitment to serve India and fulfil its aspirations. He also thanked Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the vision of Digital India, which he said had given Jio Platforms its purpose.
