Ambani's Reliance Jio: Businesses and investors of the IPO-bound firm

Synopsis

Reliance Jio Platforms, owned by billionaire Mukesh Ambani, is preparing to seek approvals for a Mumbai IPO that could become India’s biggest stock market listing. Reuters reported the offering may raise up to $4 billion, though timelines were delayed due to weaker IPO sentiment after tensions in West Asia.

Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Jio Platforms is gearing up to seek regulatory approvals for a Mumbai listing, in what is likely to be the biggest-ever stock offering in the country.

Here are facts and numbers on Jio Platforms, which houses the world's second-largest telecom company by users after China Mobile.

Telecom Business

Reliance Jio Platforms is a unit of Ambani's oil-to-retail conglomerate Reliance Industries. It is most known for the telecom business - Reliance Jio Infocomm, which is the country's biggest player with more than 500 million subscribers.

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Launched in 2016, the telecom business, ‌popularly just called ⁠Jio, hit ⁠rivals such as Bharti Airtel and Vodafone-Idea hard by offering free voice and data plans initially.

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The move, in line with Ambani's typical strategy of offering ultra-low prices to lure consumers, drove up its customer base and allowed many Indians to access platforms such as YouTube and Facebook for the first time.

Jio says it currently has a roughly 60% share of India's data traffic.

In recent years, Reliance Jio Platforms has diversified beyond telecom into AI, cloud and enterprise network services, as well as app development. In 2023, Nvidia announced AI partnership with Reliance to develop cloud infrastructure and language models.

The Leadership

Mukesh Ambani, Asia's richest man, is ⁠the chairman ‌of Jio Platforms. His three children - Akash, Anant and Isha - serve on its board. Akash Ambani, his elder son, is the chairman of the company's flagship telecom unit, Reliance Jio Infocomm.

Reliance Industries holds 66.43% stake in ⁠Jio Platforms.

Kiran Thomas is the CEO of Jio Platforms.

Key Financials, Valuation

Reliance Jio Platforms' operating revenue in the last financial year ending March 2025 stood at $13.65 billion. But 90% of that came just from the telecom business, which the company says has grown annually by 13% since 2020-21.

Reliance Jio Platforms posted a profit after tax of $2.8 billion in the year.

In November, investment bank Jefferies estimated that Reliance Jio's valuation stood at $180 billion. Sources told Reuters in January the IPO could be worth as much as $4 billion, though final numbers will only be decided later.

Marquee Investors

In 2020, Jio Platforms raised more than $20.5 billion from 13 global investors in exchange for a roughly 33% ‌equity stake, at a valuation range of $57 billion to $65 billion.

Global names such as Meta Platforms, Alphabet and KKR invested in the firm, as Ambani sought to turn Jio Platforms into the centerpiece of his technology ambitions.

Other investors include General Atlantic, Silver Lake and ⁠the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. Meta owns a 9.9% stake in the company, followed by Google's 7.7% stake.

The IPO journey

The filing, which had been targeted for as early as March, has been pushed back as IPO activity slowed following the outbreak of the conflict in West Asia, with investors losing their appetite for new listings.

The IPO, previously expected to be a pure offer-for-sale where foreign investors would have sold some of their holdings, is now being planned as a fundraising, aiming to issue shares worth 2.5% of the company's size.

The company's IPO has been long delayed. In 2019, Ambani said Jio would "move towards" a listing within five years, but later the plans were delayed in 2025.

The company has hired 17 banks to manage its offering.

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