India’s Jio Platforms has drawn bids of more than 2.5 trillion rupees, about 26 billion dollars, for the anchor tranche of its initial public offering, more than 30 times the shares reserved for institutional anchors. The company said on Monday it had finalised the allocation of 72.47 million shares to anchor investors at 1,119 rupees a share, the top of the price band, raising 81.1 billion rupees before the public offer opens.
The full offer seeks up to 302 billion rupees, about 3.2 billion dollars, which would make it India’s largest IPO in rupee terms, ahead of Hyundai Motor India’s 2024 issue. At the top of the band Jio is valued at about 108 billion dollars. The anchor book drew BlackRock, Capital Group, Fidelity, Singapore’s GIC and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, according to people familiar with the matter cited by Reuters, alongside India’s Life Insurance Corporation, which took the largest single allocation in the company’s published list.
Jio is the telecom and digital arm of Reliance Industries, backed at the platform level by Meta and Google, with more than 500 million mobile subscribers and expanding cloud and AI businesses. The offering consists only of new shares, and the company plans to apply up to 275 billion rupees to repaying borrowings at its mobile carrier, Reliance Jio Infocomm, with the rest for general corporate purposes. Reliance keeps a majority stake after listing.
Public bidding runs from Wednesday, October 21 to Friday, October 23, with trading expected on or about October 28 on the NSE and BSE. The anchor oversubscription is a demand signal at the top of the range, not a completed raise: the test that counts is whether public and qualified institutional books hold the same price once the full 302 billion rupees is on offer.