Jio Platforms' mega initial public offering (IPO) has set a global record, attracting more than one crore applications with five hours still left before the issue closes, sources said on Friday.
The offering has surpassed the previous record of around 97 lakh applications, set by Waaree Energies, becoming the first public issue anywhere in the world to cross the one-crore mark.
Jio Platforms has also outstripped previous Indian record-holders, including Bajaj Housing Finance, sources said.
It is being closely watched as a test of investor appetite for large listings at a time when AI-linked stocks are facing increased scrutiny.
Jio Platforms' IPO had drawn bids for 136.32 crore shares, against 19.75 crore shares on offer, by 12:03 pm on Friday. That is an overall subscription of almost seven times.
Institutional demand is leading. Qualified Institutional Buyers bid 70.85 crore shares against 4.90 crore reserved, or 14.46 times. Domestic financial institutions (banks, FIs and insurers) accounted for 34.51 crore shares and foreign institutional investors for 26.95 crore. Mutual funds were much smaller at 4.40 crore.
Non-Institutional Investors were at 9.45 times.
Retail Individual Investors bid 17.19 crore shares against 8.50 crore shares on offer, or 2.02 times. Shareholders' reservation portion is at 5.68 times, while the employee reservation is at 2.48 times.
The IPO comprises an entirely fresh issue of 27 crore shares. At the upper end of the price band, Jio Platforms will raise about Rs 30,213 crore and command a valuation of roughly USD 108 billion.
Neither parent Reliance Industries Ltd nor its other existing shareholders are selling shares in the offering.
Jio Platforms had already raised about Rs 8,110 crore from 212 anchor investors on October 19, allotting shares at Rs 1,119 a piece, the upper end of the price band.
The anchor book reportedly attracted bids exceeding Rs 2.5 lakh crore, more than 30 times the allocation available. Investors included global asset managers and sovereign wealth funds such as BlackRock, Fidelity Investments, GIC and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.
Jio Platforms plans to use up to Rs 27,500 crore of the proceeds to repay borrowings at Reliance Jio Infocomm, its wholly-owned subsidiary. The remaining proceeds will support capital expenditure, including investments in technology and digital services, and working capital requirements.
JPL Managing Director Akash Ambani had recently said that Jio Platforms is betting that its technology, artificial intelligence and cloud ambitions will drive growth beyond telecom.
"There is no either-or at Jio: the network is our technology," Ambani said in an interview with PTI, highlighting the company's in-house 5G core, cloud-native radio access network and software platform serving 533.3 million customers.
"Connectivity was the first product we built on that platform. Digital services, AI and cloud are what we are layering on top of it now," he had said.
Reliance family
Jio is part of Ambani's Reliance Industries, a company often seen by Indian investors as a long-term wealth generator. Reliance shares have returned around 900 per cent since 2006, beating the benchmark Nifty index's 685 per cent return, LSEG data shows.
Jio's telecoms business was launched in 2016 and disrupted the market by offering free voice and data, hitting rivals Bharti Airtel and Vodafone-Idea. Today, on the basis of customers in a single country, Jio's 500 million-plus users are second only to China Mobile's.
As of Friday, the IPO’s retail portion was subscribed two times, the employee quota drew bids for 2.5 times the shares on offer and the existing Reliance shareholders quota was 5.7 times subscribed, exchange data showed.
Reliance was founded by Akash's grandfather Dhirubhai Ambani, who died in 2002 after building the company's brand image with shareholders via large-scale meetings in Mumbai’s open grounds in the 1980s. On its website, it says the 1977 listing of the company created history by "ushering the equity cult in India".