Jio Platforms plans to raise revenue per customer mainly by selling more services rather than lifting tariffs, though it keeps the option of higher prices, Managing Director Akash Ambani said on Thursday, days before the Reliance Industries unit opens what would be India's largest initial public offering.
"We always have the ability to take up prices," Ambani told a press conference in Mumbai, but the company would rather give customers more services and charge for them than rely on price per gigabyte as its main lever.
Asked whether a tariff increase was coming, he gave no timeline. He said telecom spending per user as a share of India's per-capita income had roughly halved to about 1 per cent since Jio's 2016 launch, which he called headroom.
Chief Executive Pankaj Pawar said tariffs were only one of several levers.
Akash said Jio charges about Rs 4.9 per gigabyte against an industry average of Rs 7.5, with customers using 43.7 GB a month.
"We expect a USD 1.4-trillion digital economy by FY31; we will take a huge market share of this," Akash said, naming mobile, home broadband and enterprise and international services as the growth engines.
He said Jio carries more than 60 per cent of India's wireless data traffic.
New services outside Jio's licensed telecom business, such as a voice-AI feature announced at Reliance's annual meeting, could push its EBITDA margin above the current level. The margin was 53.3 per cent in April-June, up from about 50 per cent three years ago, he added.
On overseas expansion, Ambani said Jio would offer its in-house network technology to foreign operators as a managed-service partner, not by selling hardware or software licences, and without heavy capital spending.
He said the split between domestic and international revenue would become clear "as we sign on our first customers".
India accounted for 96.62 per cent of revenue in the year to March 2026, according to the company's prospectus, which gives no figures for overseas sales.
Jio set a price band of Rs 1,065 to 1,119 a share for its offer of up to 27 crore new shares, about 3 per cent of existing capital, with no offer-for-sale component.
At the top of the band, the sale would raise about Rs 30,213 crore, ahead of Hyundai Motor India's Rs 27,870 crore share sale in October 2024, the country's biggest.
The price implies a market value of about Rs 10.3 lakh crore, short of the roughly Rs 11 lakh crore the company had earlier been said to seek.
Bidding runs from October 21 to 23, with anchor investors bidding on October 19. Shares are expected to begin trading on October 28. Proceeds will go toward prepaying borrowings of Reliance Jio Infocomm, the telecom subsidiary, and general corporate purposes, according to the October 14 red herring prospectus.
Reliance Jio Infocomm served 533.3 million customers at June-end, including 284.9 million on 5G, which Ambani said was the largest 5G base outside China. Average revenue per user rose to Rs 215.6 a month.
Average monthly data consumption per customer reached 43.7 GB in the first quarter of FY27.
The company reported EBITDA of Rs 76,225 crore in FY26, with a compound annual growth rate of 17.8 per cent between FY24 and FY26. Its EBITDA margin stood at 53.3 per cent in the first quarter of FY27, he said.
Ambani called home broadband the biggest growth engine, citing industry-wide additions of about 340 million 4G and 5G customers between fiscal 2026 and 2031 as another driver. Jio had 28.6 million fixed broadband customers and took 67.5 per cent of India's net fixed additions in fiscal 2026, he said.
Reliance Industries owns 66.43 per cent of Jio Platforms.
Meta Platforms affiliate Jaadhu Holdings holds 9.98 per cent and Google International 7.73 per cent. Nineteen banks, including Kotak Mahindra Capital, Morgan Stanley, BofA Securities, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Citi, are managing the offer.
Ambani outlined a strategy built around technology, digital connectivity and infrastructure, supported by three growth engines: mobility, home broadband, and enterprise and international services.
Jio's technology platform, which Ambani described as an end-to-end technology stack, is central to the strategy. Its connectivity business provides access to 533.3 million customers, and its infrastructure includes 3,60,537 towers and 26,800 MHz of spectrum.
In mobility, Jio expects industry-wide additions of 340 million 4G and 5G customers between FY26 and FY31, creating opportunities for higher average revenue per user (ARPU), a key measure of telecom operators' revenue-generating capacity.
Home broadband is another growth driver. Jio had 28.6 million fixed broadband customers and accounted for 67.5 per cent of India's net fixed broadband additions in FY26.
In enterprise services, Jio is targeting India's estimated Rs 5.1 trillion addressable market for digital services in FY26. It also plans to monetise its technology stack in selected overseas markets.
Ambani highlighted the transformation in India's digital connectivity since Jio entered the telecom market in 2016, when average download speeds were about 2.5 Mbps. They have since risen to around 68 Mbps nationally.
He said Jio's average 5G download speed was 198.9 Mbps, roughly twice that of competing operators over the preceding three years. The company also highlighted the sharp decline in data costs since its entry into the market, saying its current pricing stood among the lowest globally.
The expansion of affordable mobile data has helped drive higher consumption of online video, digital payments and other internet services, while the rollout of 5G and fixed broadband is opening additional opportunities for telecom operators to monetise data demand.
Ambani said the company's goal was to help make India a leading digital society, with Jio serving as a partner in that transformation.
He pitched Jio Platforms as a technology company rather than a mobile carrier, saying it will sell its in-house network software and equipment to overseas operators, though the business remains overwhelmingly domestic.
Failed college assignment led to the idea for Jio
A failed attempt at uploading a college assignment back in 2009-10 because the "internet did not work" sparked the idea and conversations that became Jio, Isha Ambani said on Thursday.
Addressing a press conference ahead of the Jio Platforms' IPO - at cap price it works out to over Rs 30,200 crore, and India's largest public market offering so far - Isha recalled that around the year 2009-10, she and her brother Akash were studying in the US and were home in Mumbai on a break. She tried to submit an assignment online, but the internet did not work.
"Let me begin by telling you the story about how Jio was born. It was about 2009-2010. Akash and I were in college in the States, and we were back home in Bombay (Mumbai) for a break. And I had an assignment to submit online. I tried to submit the assignment, but unfortunately, the internet did not work, and I couldn't submit it," she said.
What followed were deep conversations about why should India be left behind in the digital space, she recalled.
"Why was it that we didn't have the same type of connectivity that we enjoyed in the West?' she said.
Akash, she said, referring to her twin brother and current Managing Director of Jio Platforms, firmly believed then that the answer was to create a digital technology platform company.
"Akash firmly believed that the answer and solution to this was creating a digital technology platform company. In 2016, Jio launched, and here we are today in 2026," said Isha, who is a director on the board of Jio Platforms.
She described Jio's journey as an extension of the Reliance philosophy of building businesses: ideas backed by a long-term perspective, scale that can change the economics of an industry, and execution that is "hard-coded" into the organisation.
Isha also invoked her grandfather Dhirubhai Ambani, who took Reliance Industries public in 1977. For him, she said, Reliance was never just a company but a promise that every Indian should share in the country's growth and prosperity.
"Three generations later," Isha said, she, Akash, and brother Anant Ambani remain committed to the motto "Growth is life".