Top India telecom and digital company to file for IPO

AFP | Mumbai

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One of India’s top telecommunications and AI companies will file papers for an IPO on Friday, billionaire Mukesh Ambani said, kicking off the process for one of the country’s most-awaited stock market debuts.

Reliance Industries’ digital arm, Jio Platforms, will issue as many as 270 million shares at 10 rupees ($0.11) as part of the listing, according to a stock exchange filing.

Reliance is India’s most valuable company by market capitalisation and has business interests ranging from oil refining to green energy.

While Jio Platforms dabbles in everything from AI to enterprise network services, it is primarily known for its subsidiary Jio Infocomm -- India’s largest telecoms firm by users.

The pricing was not immediately disclosed, but local media reports have suggested the IPO could raise as much as $4 billion and fetch a market valuation of over $100 billion.

If that happens, the IPO will eclipse a previous listing record set by Hyundai’s India unit in 2024.

“The proposed listing of Jio will demonstrate to the world that India can build technology companies of global scale, global capability and global value,” Ambani, Reliance’s chairman, said in televised speech to shareholders.

Jio’s wireless carrier service was launched a decade ago and quickly grabbed customers away from rivals Bharti Airtel and Vodafone through aggressive discounts.

Experts credit the company’s free 4G offers with allowing hundreds of thousands of Indians to access data-hungry services like YouTube and Netflix for the first time.

Today, the company has over 520 million subscribers and accounts for roughly 60 per cent of India’s data traffic.

Jio Platforms and its broader digital push have for years been a key part of Ambani’s efforts to diversify his conglomerate away from its core oil refining business.

The company raised over $20 billion from top investors and tech firms such as Meta and Alphabet in 2020 as it sought to tap global expertise while building a digital ecosystem, including an online payments app and a streaming service.