Reliance Industries moved its October payday up by about 15 days, just before the Jio Platforms IPO opens for bids on Oct. 21. According to a Bloomberg report cited by Business Today, the company also reached out to most of its roughly 420,000 employees about the share sale and checked whether they and their families had the electronic trading accounts needed to buy shares. Staff were not told why the money arrived early.
That push makes more sense once you look at where the money goes.
Every share in this offering is a new share. Nobody who already owns Jio is selling. At the top of the price range (₹1,065 to ₹1,119 per share), the Jio Platforms IPO raises up to ₹30,213 crore, or about $3.2 billion. A crore is 10 million rupees. Of that total, up to ₹27,500 crore is set aside to repay borrowings at Reliance Jio Infocomm, the mobile network company that sits inside Jio, according to the prospectus details reported by TechCrunch. Put simply: out of every ₹100 a new investor puts in, about ₹91 goes to the telecom unit’s lenders.
The big outside investors who came in back in 2020, including Meta, Google and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, are keeping every share, Bloomberg reported. Even at the bottom of the price range, it will be India’s largest IPO, passing the ₹27,870 crore that Hyundai Motor India raised in 2024.
What the price says
Those 2020 deals also show how far the price has moved. Back then, Jio was valued at up to ₹4.91 trillion, about $65 billion at the time. The top of today’s range values it at about ₹10.3 trillion, roughly $108 billion.
Now compare that with profit. In the quarter that ended in June, Jio earned ₹77.6 billion. Multiply by four for a rough yearly figure, and the IPO price comes to about 33 times a year’s profit. In everyday terms: if profit never grew, a buyer at the top price would need about 33 years of today’s earnings to get their money back. So buyers are paying now for profit that Jio still has to grow into.
Who gets to buy, and in what order
Big institutions go first. These are called anchor investors, and they get their shares on Oct. 19, before everyone else. Bloomberg reported that the anchor book drew more than $20 billion in bids, with Fidelity, Allianz and Capital Group among the interested funds.
Regular investors bid from Oct. 21 to Oct. 23, and at least 35% of the net issue is set aside for them. There are also two side doors. Eligible Jio employees can bid for up to ₹500 crore of shares at ₹54 off per share. People who held Reliance Industries shares on Oct. 14 have their own pool of up to ₹2,500 crore.
This isn’t the first big Indian listing where the price itself is the story. I looked at another one when the country’s biggest stock exchange cut its own valuation: the NSE IPO.
The useful question for a buyer this week is not about the early paycheck. It’s this: once the debt is paid down, how fast can Jio’s profit grow into a $108 billion price tag?
My take: When the paycheck comes early, check whose loan it ends up paying.
Not advice. Just how I see it.