Jio Platforms has drawn more than $20B in bids for what would be India’s largest listing, with Fidelity, Allianz and Capital Group indicating interest. The company is now seeking about $108B, against the $170B bankers discussed last November.
Jio Platforms has drawn more than $20B in bids for what would be India’s largest listing. The share sale is expected to open next week, with the listing completed before 30 October.
Fidelity, Allianz and Capital Group have indicated interest, Bloomberg reported, with the final anchor list due within days. Allianz is German, and Akash Ambani’s roadshow ran through London as well as Hong Kong and New York.
The price has come down a long way. When Jio filed in June, analysts put the company between $131B and $180B.
It is now seeking as much as 10.3 trillion rupees, about $108B. Bankers were discussing a figure as high as $170B last November, so the ask has fallen by roughly a third.
The timing explains some of it. Databricks’ chief executive called 2026 a terrible year to go public, and his company has stayed private.
His reason was competition for the same pool of money. SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI are seeking more than $200B from public investors between them, and institutional allocation budgets are finite.
Bankers read it the other way. BNP Paribas told TNW in June that liquidity attracts liquidity, and that the American wave would pull European listings along with it.
Jio is the first real test of which reading is right. Twenty billion dollars of demand is a strong book, but it was assembled only after the price came down.
The money has somewhere to go beyond the balance sheet. Jio is planning a 1,650-satellite constellation for Indian broadband, at an estimated cost of $10B to $15B.
Most of the proceeds go to debt. About 275 billion rupees will prepay external commercial borrowings at Reliance Jio Infocomm, the telecom subsidiary.
Several of those lenders are European. BNP Paribas and Barclays sit alongside ANZ, Bank of America and Citibank on the facility being repaid, so a slice of an Indian listing lands on European balance sheets.
Nobody is cashing out. The offer is entirely new shares, and Meta, Alphabet, Mubadala and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund are all staying in, according to the draft prospectus.
At the top of the band the sale raises about 302 billion rupees. India’s record is Hyundai’s local unit, at roughly 279 billion rupees in 2024.