Sebi clears Jio Platforms to sell 27 crore new shares in what would be India’s largest IPO

The Securities and Exchange Board of India issued its observation letter on Jio Platforms’ draft prospectus on 28 August, the last regulatory gate before Mukesh Ambani’s digital and telecom holding company can print a red herring and set a price band. Reliance Industries told the exchanges the same day that its subsidiary had the letter. The issue, as filed on 19 June, is a fresh sale of up to 27 crore shares of Rs 10 face value, about 2.9 percent of the company after the offer.

Market desks put the raise near Rs 37,700 crore, or about $3.8 billion, if the book lands where bankers have been talking. That would pass Hyundai Motor India’s 2024 listing, which raised the rupee equivalent of $3.3 billion, and would also stand above the National Stock Exchange’s still-pending offer, estimated near Rs 30,000 crore. People familiar with the file have mentioned a valuation around $137 billion. Bloomberg has used a figure above $100 billion. None of those numbers is official until the band is out.

The use of proceeds is blunt. The draft says about Rs 27,500 crore will repay or prepay borrowings at Reliance Jio Infocomm, the mobile network that sits under Jio Platforms. The rest is listed as general corporate purposes. Jio Infocomm is the operating company with more than 53 crore wireless subscribers as of June 2026, second only to China Mobile on a global headcount. The IPO does not sell the tower company or the retail chain. It sells a sliver of the holding company that owns the carrier, the apps and the fintech stack.

The cap table is why foreign desks will read the prospectus twice. Reliance remains the majority owner at 66.43 percent. Meta Platforms holds 9.98 percent. Google holds 7.73 percent. Those 2020 cash injections, struck when Jio was still private, will be marked to a public price for the first time. A 2.9 percent primary sale does not give either American firm an exit. It does give the market a daily print on a stake they have carried for six years.

Kotak Mahindra Capital is the lead manager on the Sebi letter. The price will be set by book-building. No date has been named. Sebi also cleared several smaller offers the same week, including Paras Healthcare, Sadbhav Futuretech and Bharat PET. Those files will not move the index. Jio will.

Two facts sit under the headline size. First, most of the cash goes to debt at the subsidiary, not to new spectrum, new data centres or a dividend. Investors are being asked to refinance Jio Infocomm through a listed parent. Second, the public float will be thin. A sub-3 percent primary issue leaves control untouched and leaves the free float dependent on whatever secondary selling, if any, arrives later. Index inclusion and derivatives will follow the float, not the headline valuation.

Ambani has timed the letter for a market that has already absorbed a run of large offers and is now watching U.S. rates and the Iran war’s effect on energy costs. A $3.8 billion book needs both domestic systematic investment flows and overseas accounts that still want India telecom after years of price wars. The observation letter does not answer those buyers. It only says the document is clean enough to take on the road.

When the band appears, the comparison will not be Hyundai. It will be whether a 53-crore-subscriber carrier, wrapped in a holding company with Meta and Google still on the register, can clear a valuation that assumes the tariff cycle has bottomed and that the debt being repaid was cheap enough to lock in.