India’s initial public offering market has had its biggest month on record in October, with Jio Platforms’ listing lifting the country to the top of the global IPO league table, Bloomberg reported on Friday. The telecom and digital services unit of Reliance Industries is the month defining transaction.
Jio raised about 30,213 crore rupees, roughly 3.2 billion dollars, in India’s largest ever IPO. The all primary offering drew bids worth more than 77 billion dollars, was subscribed 22.19 times, and attracted more than 13.8 million applications, a record. The shares opened at 1,358 rupees against an issue price of 1,119 rupees, valuing the company at about 131.9 billion dollars, India’s second most valuable listed company behind Reliance itself.
Up to 27,500 crore rupees of the proceeds will repay or prepay borrowings at Reliance Jio Infocomm, the operating telecom subsidiary, with the rest for general corporate purposes. No existing shareholder sold: Meta and Google, which invested in 2020, held their positions through the listing, and only about 3 percent of the company trades freely.
The record month was set while the Nifty 50 was down over the past year, which makes the month’s volumes a domestic liquidity story as much as an issuer story. The pipeline question for November is whether issuers without Jio’s brand can price at similar multiples.