Jio Platforms will seek as much as ₹30,213 crore, or about $3.2 billion, in what would be India’s largest initial public offering (IPO), setting a price range of ₹1,065 to ₹1,119 a share as parent Reliance Industries Ltd prepares to list the business that transformed the country’s telecom market.

The offering will open Wednesday, 21 October, and close Friday, 23 October, with bidding by anchor investors scheduled for 19 October. Jio plans to issue as many as 270 million new shares, with no offer for sale by Reliance Industries or its other existing shareholders.

At the top of the price range, Jio would be valued at about ₹10.3 trillion, or $108 billion, potentially making it India’s fourth-largest listed company by market capitalization. The IPO would surpass Hyundai Motor India’s 2024 offering as the country’s biggest.

Jio Managing Director Akash Ambani said Thursday that the proceeds would strengthen the company’s balance sheet as it enters its next phase of expansion.

“All our IPO proceeds go towards reducing our debt,” Ambani said at the company’s press conference, adding that Jio was heading toward becoming a net debt-free company.

Jio plans to use as much as ₹27,500 crore, or about $2.9 billion, of the net proceeds to repay or prepay borrowings at Reliance Jio Infocomm, its main telecom subsidiary. The remainder will be available for general corporate purposes.

That makes the IPO largely a capital-raising and debt-reduction exercise rather than an exit for Reliance or the global investors that backed Jio in 2020.

Meta, Google, KKR, Silver Lake, Mubadala, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund are among investors that bought stakes during that fundraising round.

Reliance will remain Jio’s controlling shareholder after the listing.

The company has also reserved shares worth as much as ₹2,500 crore, or about $264 million, for eligible Reliance Industries shareholders and up to ₹500 crore, or about $53 million, for employees.

Eligible employees will receive a ₹54-a-share discount. The minimum application is 12 shares, worth ₹13,428, or about $142, at the top of the price range.

From telecom to technology

Jio is entering the public market a decade after launching commercial mobile services and triggering a price war that reshaped India’s telecom industry.

The company now wants investors to value it as more than a mobile operator.

“The mission of Jio is to connect every Indian home, every Indian citizen and every Indian enterprise,” Ambani said on Thursday.

He identified mobile services, home broadband, enterprise technology and the export of Jio’s internally developed technology as major avenues for future growth.

Jio had about 533 million subscribers by the end of June and carries close to 60% of India’s mobile data traffic. Its scale has made it the country’s largest telecom operator and given it one of the world’s biggest digital customer bases.

Revenue from operations rose 14.6% in the year ended March 2026 to about ₹1.47 trillion, or $15.5 billion, while earning before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, or Ebitda, climbed 18.8% to ₹76,255 crore, or about $8 billion. Ebitda is a measure of profitability.

Profit after tax increased 15.1% to more than ₹30,000 crore, or roughly $3.2 billion. Jio’s Ebitda margin reached 51.9% for the year. Ambani said Ebitda had grown at an average annual rate of 17.8% over the past three years.

“The basis of our Ebitda growth has been powering over 60% of India’s digital growth,” he said.

Jio remains heavily dependent on connectivity for earnings, however. Investors will have to judge how quickly newer businesses including cloud services, enterprise technology, AI, digital applications, data centers and satellite broadband can contribute meaningful profits.

Jio targets 100 million homes

Home broadband is central to Jio’s next phase. The company plans to expand its addressable broadband market from about 40 million homes to 100 million across roughly 19,000 postal codes. About 40% of its net customer additions are coming from outside India’s biggest cities, according to Ambani.

Jio has increasingly used fixed wireless access alongside fiber to expand faster and avoid some of the delays involved in laying physical networks. About 6.5 million customers use Jio’s proprietary wireless broadband technology, which accounts for roughly 40% of new home-broadband additions.

The company is also trying to sell broadband customers television, entertainment and other digital services rather than connectivity alone.

That gives Jio an opportunity to raise revenue per household even as the Indian mobile market becomes increasingly mature.

Enterprise market comes next

Jio estimates India’s enterprise digital-services market at about $56 billion and wants a larger share of spending on connectivity, cloud computing, cybersecurity and business applications.

Ambani said Jio already connects about 65% of India’s bank branches and provides services ranging from broadband to video surveillance and security systems.

Enterprise services could provide another source of growth as subscriber additions in the consumer mobile business become harder to sustain.

Average revenue per user remains an important measure of that transition.

Jio’s quarterly ARPU, or average revenue per user, reached ₹215.6, or about $2.27, in the three months through June, still below Bharti Airtel’s ₹264, or about $2.78.

That leaves scope for Jio to extract more revenue from its subscriber base, but tariff increases will have to be weighed against its longstanding position as a lower-cost operator.

Analysts increasingly see tariff hikes as one of the main earnings drivers for the sector as the period of rapid subscriber growth slows.

Jio takes its technology abroad

Ambani also used the IPO presentation to set out plans to turn Jio’s technology stack into an international business. Rather than building and owning telecom networks overseas, Jio plans to work with foreign operators through an asset-light managed-services model.

“What we see is the end-to-end technologies that we’ve created, deployed and operated,” Ambani said, describing the opportunity to partner with telecom operators overseas.

Jio has not identified potential foreign partners or disclosed financial targets for the business.

The company argues that developing its own network software, devices, cloud infrastructure and digital services for the Indian market has produced technology that can be sold elsewhere.

Ambani said Jio had filed 7,220 patent applications in India and overseas as of 30 June and employs more than 12,000 engineers.

The company was the only Indian business among the top 20 applicants in the World Intellectual Property Organization’s 2025 Patent Cooperation Treaty rankings.

The overseas strategy forms part of Jio’s effort to present itself ahead of the IPO as a technology company rather than simply a domestic telecom operator.

AI joins the investment case

Artificial intelligence has also become part of Jio’s pitch to investors. The company is adding AI functions across its consumer services and network and has partnered with Google around Gemini.

Ambani said the partnership helped bring 30 million users to the AI service. Jio is also developing voice-based AI products capable of transcription, summarization and generating action points across 12 Indian languages.

Its ability to distribute new services across more than half a billion customers gives Jio a platform few companies can match in India. Whether that scale can be converted into substantial AI revenue is less certain.

The prospectus flags technology shifts, cybersecurity threats and changing regulation among risks that could affect future growth.

A decade that changed Indian telecom

The IPO comes a little more than 10 years after Jio began commercial operations in September 2016. Its entry transformed mobile internet economics in India. Jio offered free voice calls and sharply cheaper data, forcing rivals to lower prices and accelerating consolidation across an industry that once had more than a dozen operators.

“We saw that as our biggest opportunity, to change India from a data-scarce nation to a data-abundant nation,” Ambani said.

India’s private telecom market is now dominated by Jio and Bharti Airtel, with Vodafone Idea a considerably smaller third operator.

Jio said its network covered 99% of India’s population at the end of March and carried about 241 exabytes of data during fiscal 2026, more than 30% higher than a year earlier.

Its next challenge is different from the one it faced at launch.

Akash and Isha take center stage

The IPO also places Mukesh Ambani’s succession plans more squarely before public-market investors. Akash Ambani and his twin sister Isha Ambani have taken prominent roles in presenting the Jio story to investors. Akash leads Jio, while Isha has focused more heavily on Reliance’s retail and consumer businesses.

At Thursday’s IPO event, Isha recalled that the idea behind Jio began when the siblings were students in the US and returned to Mumbai during a college break.

“I tried to submit an assignment, but unfortunately, the internet did not work,” she said.

The experience led the siblings to discuss the gap between internet access in India and the US, according to Isha.

Mukesh Ambani previously told shareholders that Isha, Akash and Anant Ambani were leading the IPO process and would head the next generation of value creation across the group.

Veteran banker Uday Kotak, whose firm is among those managing the offering, also linked the listing to Reliance’s generational transition.

He called the IPO a “testament for next generation of leadership.”

“What differentiates the Jio group? 53 crore customers. Extraordinary execution,” Kotak said.

Bharti Enterprises chairman Sunil Bharti Mittal, whose Airtel is Jio’s principal rival, has also welcomed the offering.

“Excellent, we are all looking forward to a very successful IPO,” Mittal said at the India Mobile Congress.

IPO resets telecom valuations

Reliance Industries shares jumped 3.4% on Thursday after the final IPO terms were announced, their biggest one-day gain in more than two months.

Bharti Airtel rose about 3.3%, its strongest session in six weeks.

The listing will for the first time give investors a directly observable market value for Reliance’s biggest digital asset.

It will also establish a new public-market valuation benchmark for Indian telecom.

At the top of the IPO range, Jio would be valued at roughly $108 billion. Including debt and other liabilities, Nomura estimates enterprise value at about ₹10.9 trillion to ₹11.4 trillion, or $113 billion to $118 billion.

The brokerage estimates Jio’s forward enterprise value-to-Ebitda multiple at about 10.5 to 10.9 times, compared with roughly 9.2 times for Airtel.

Airtel has higher revenue per subscriber and has shown stronger monetization. Jio brings greater scale, heavier data traffic and access to more than 500 million users.

The IPO gives public investors their first chance to make that comparison directly.