SEBI clears Jio Platforms IPO of up to ₹37,700 crore

Jio Platforms received the Securities and Exchange Board of India’s observation letter on Friday, 28 August, on the draft red herring prospectus it filed on 19 June. In market language that letter is the clearance to go ahead with a public issue. Reliance Industries told the exchanges the same day that its subsidiary had the document in hand.

The draft offer is a fresh issue of up to 27 crore equity shares of face value ₹10. Bankers working on the file have put the cash raise near ₹37,700 crore, or about $3.8 billion at recent rupee rates. That would pass Hyundai Motor India’s 2024 listing, which raised the equivalent of about $3.3 billion in some tallies and $2.95 billion in others, and would sit above a still-unpriced National Stock Exchange offer that market officials have sketched near ₹30,000 crore. Price band and opening dates have not been set. The book will fix the price. Kotak Mahindra Capital is the lead manager. The SEBI nod is valid for one year.

Most of the money has a named job. The draft says about ₹27,500 crore, or $3.3 billion, will repay or prepay borrowings at Reliance Jio Infocomm, the operating wireless company inside the holding structure. The rest is tagged for general corporate purposes. Jio Platforms is the parent for telecom, digital and fintech units. It is not a sale of existing promoter stock.

Ownership after the issue is the other figure investors will mark. Reliance Industries holds 66.43 percent. Meta Platforms holds 9.98 percent. Google holds 7.73 percent. Other names on the register include Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, KKR, Vista Equity Partners, Silver Lake, Mubadala, General Atlantic Singapore, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and TPG. The new shares would be about 2.9 percent of the post-issue equity. At the banker range discussed around the filing, that slice implies an equity value near $130 billion to $137 billion, well above the $100 billion mark that followed the 2020 private placement.

The operating company behind those numbers is large in subscribers and smaller in staff than a year ago. Reliance Jio had more than 533 million wireless subscribers at the end of June 2026, second only to China Mobile among mobile operators. The holding company reported a fall in headcount of about 21 percent, to 27,935 people, in the year to 31 March, while revenue and subscriber counts still rose. Management under Akash Ambani has been moving the group from cheap data and voice into cloud, enterprise networks and artificial intelligence products. The listing is the first clean public file on that mix, separate from the oil-to-retail parent.

SEBI also cleared other offers in the same week, including Paras Healthcare, Pushp Brand India, M K Sons Fine Jewels, Sadbhav Futuretech and Bharat PET, and a pre-filing for Paramotor Digital Technology. None of those files approaches Jio’s size. The comparison that matters in Mumbai is with Hyundai and with the pending NSE deal, and with the 2020 private round that brought Meta and Google onto the register at valuations the market has not been able to mark to market since.

A listed Jio will give those early investors a public price and a path to sell under lock-up rules once the issue is done. It will also give the parent a way to cut Infocomm debt without tapping the Reliance Industries balance sheet in the same way. What it will not do, on the draft as written, is hand control away. A 2.9 percent dilution leaves Mukesh Ambani’s company with a two-thirds stake and the same operating questions it already faces: how fast enterprise and digital revenue can grow once the subscriber base is already the size of a large country, and what multiple public investors will pay for that growth after they can finally buy the shares.