India’s second richest man Mukesh Ambani’s digital and telecommunications venture is tapping public investors for the first time in what’s expected to be the country’s largest share sale.
Jio Platforms, a unit of conglomerate Reliance Industries Ltd, aims to raise 302bn rupees ($3.2bn; £2.8bn) in the initial public offering (IPO) of freshly issued shares from Wednesday.
The company will use the money to repay loans it took to build and expand its unit Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd, India’s largest private-sector telecoms operator.
This is the second mega IPO in a month in India after the National Stock Exchange’s $2.4bn-issue despite the weakness in the broader equity market.
Arun Kejriwal of Kejriwal Research and Investment Services told the BBC that while the share market has remained subdued, the IPO market has been flush with issues and has seen interest from institutions and retail investors driven by attractive valuations and interest in new and scalable technology businesses.
He said that IPOs are being priced to reflect lower valuations and price-to-earnings (P/E) ratios among listed companies, making them attractive. The P/E ratio measures how much investors are willing to pay for each unit of a company’s earnings.
Jio Platforms is offering shares in the price band of 1,065 to 1,119 rupees in the issue that closes Friday.
The share issue comes as the Nifty 50, the NSE’s benchmark index of 50 leading Indian companies, has fallen by over 12% this year.
According to a Reuters report, institutional investors on Monday placed bids worth $3.2bn, which is 30 times the shares exclusively reserved for them and offered ahead of the IPO opening.
The response from institutional investors aligns with analysts’ view that investors will be drawn to the IPO for Jio’s scale, network infrastructure and established customer relationships.
Centrum Institutional Research, part of an Indian brokerage, said in a note that “with strong network leadership, large scale infrastructure, and a deepening digital ecosystem, Jio is well positioned to sustain industry-leading growth over the medium-to-long term”.
But analysts also flag that competition is likely to remain intense for the company with price wars and potential churn in customer base.
Recently, technology billionaire Elon Musk publicly took on the low-cost Reliance Jio declaring that his Starlink’s satellite internet service will be priced affordably in India.
Musk criticised Ambani on social media platform X as his satellite internet company struggles to get a final approval for a commercial launch in India.
The criticisms escalated with Musk questioning if Ambani was the “real boss of India”. Ambani or Reliance did not respond directly to the attacks.
