18 - 10 - 2026

Reliance’s digital arm Jio Platforms’ ₹30,213 crore IPO to open on Wednesday

Jio Platforms Ltd’s, the digital and telecommunications arm of Reliance Industries Ltd, Initial Public Offering (IPO) will for subscription on Wednesday (October 21), with the firm intending to raise to ₹30,213 crore.

On completion of the IPO, this would be India’s largest-ever public offering and RIL’s first IPO in 30 years.

The company has set a price band of ₹1,065-1,119 per share. The issue comprises 27 crore newly-issued shares, each with a face value of ₹10, with no offer for sale. Anchor investor bidding is scheduled for October 19. the issue will be open for subscription till October 23.

Jio Platforms will lists its shares on the National Stock Exchange of India and the Bombay Stock Exchange on October 28.

Jio Platforms operates across telecommunications, broadband, cloud services, entertainment and enterprise technology. The company has also been recognised among the world’s top 20 patent filers.

Meanwhile a number of brokerage firms has recommended a subscribe to Jio Platforms’ IPO.

GEPL: subscribe

GEPL Capital Private Ltd (GEPL) has recommended investors to “subscribe” to Jio Platforms’ IPO, stating that the the issue, priced at 33.3 times earnings for FY26, “appears fairly valued”. The brokerage firm, in a note, puts the company’s market capitalisation at about ₹10,30,490 crore.

According to GEPL, the company’s revenue, earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) and profit after tax grew at compound annual growth rates of 16 per cent, 16.2 per cent and 18.5 per cent respectively between the financial years 2024 and 2026. For FY26, revenue from operations was ₹1,46,885 crore and EBITDA was ₹76,255 crore, a margin of 51.91 per cent. Profit after tax was ₹30,049 crore. Net leverage fell to 0.36 times from 0.88 times in the financial year 2024.

The brokerage said the company holds India’s largest spectrum bank, at 26,800.8 megahertz. Its network includes more than 1 million route km of fibre and access to 360,537 towers, with wireless broadband coverage of over 99 per cent of the population.

Compared with listed peers, the note showed Bharti Airtel trading at 40.71 times earnings with a return on net worth of 20.3 per cent, against 9.42 per cent for Jio Platforms. Vodafone Idea was at 3.99 times earnings. Jio Platforms reported earnings per share of ₹33.59.

The company said it had filed 7,220 patent applications, of which 1,043 had been granted, and employed 27,932 full-time staff and 63,795 contract personnel.

Ventura Securities: subscribe

Ventura Securities Ltd (VSL) has recommended that investors “subscribe” to the IPO). On the upper end of the price band, the note put the company’s market capitalisation after the issue at ₹10,30,490.5 crore. The number of shares in issue would rise from 893.9 crore to 920.9 crore. The promoter’s holding would fall from 66.43 per cent to 64.48 per cent, while the share held by the public and institutions would rise from 33.57 per cent to 35.52 per cent.

The company plans to use ₹27,500 crore of the proceeds to prepay, in full or in part, certain outstanding borrowings of its material subsidiary, Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited (RJIL). The note lists general corporate purposes as the second use of the funds.

Through Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited, the company served 53.33 crore customers as of 30 June 2026. In the financial year 2026, about 60 per cent of India’s wireless data traffic was carried on its network, which reaches more than 99 per cent of the population, the note said.

SMC Global Securities: subscribe

SMC Global Securities Limited (SMC) has given the initial public offering (IPO) of Jio Platforms Limited a ranking of three out of five stars, which sits at the “fair” level on its own scale.

In its peer comparison, SMC showed Bharti Airtel at 35.28 times earnings. The company plans to use the proceeds to prepay, in full or in part, certain outstanding borrowings of its material subsidiary, Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited (RJIL), with the remainder going to general corporate purposes. SMC said the aim is to reduce financial leverage and lower future finance costs.

The brokerage said cash capital expenditure fell from 48.84 per cent of revenue in the financial year 2024 to 23.27 per cent in the financial year 2026, and that tariff rationalisation in the financial year 2025 helped lift margins. It also pointed to the company’s in-house technology, including its cloud-native fifth-generation (5G) core and its JioBrain artificial intelligence (AI) platform, and to its spectrum holdings across low, mid and high frequency bands.

In its outlook, SMC said Jio Platforms is well placed for long-term growth and that normalising capital expenditure could improve free cash flow, subject to effective execution.

Emkay: subscribe

On its part, Emkay has recommended a subscribe for Jio Platforms.

Jio Platforms had launched fiber-to-the-home broadband (JioFiber) commercially in CY19 and fixed wireless access (JioAirFiber) in FY24. AirFiber runs on 5G spectrum and Jio Platforms’s proprietary point-to-multipoint unlicensed band radio (UBR) technology. UBR delivers fiber-like speeds of up to 1 GBPS without last-mile fibre or the right-of-way approvals that fibre requires.

Jio Platforms was the first company in India to offer fixed wireless services over UBR. Lower cost and faster timeto-connect let Jio Platforms serve homes from metros to rural areas, and its fixed broadband coverage now reaches about 98% of India’s pin codes.

The company offers 4G and 5G plans across a range of tenures, data allowances, and speeds. These plans increasingly bundle OTT video, music, cloud storage and computing, cloud gaming, and productivity tools. Through a partnership with Reliance Intelligence, Jio Unlimited 5G users get the Google AI Pro plan free for 18 months.

At the entry level, the JioBharat phone targets the 263.5 million Indians still on 2G networks. Jio Platforms designed and engineered the phone in-house, and is priced at ₹799 and retailed by Reliance Retail. It runs on JioBharat OS, built for low-memory chipsets, and supports UPI payments plus video and music streaming through apps JPL re-engineered for low-spec devices. The aim is to turn voice-only 2G users into data users. The mobility base skews young and has a large rural footprint.

Antique Stock Broking: subscribe

At the upper price band, Jio Platforms is valued at ₹10.3 trillion ($108 billion), implying 15.6 timed FY26 EV/EBITDA and 34.3 times P/E. While the valuation appears rich against Bharti’s consolidated 12 times EV/EBITDA, it is in line with Bharti’s India business at 15.7 times and offers a 23 per cent discount on P/E.

“We believe the price largely reflects current ARPU and subscriber levels, leaving upside from tariff repair. A 15 per cent tariff hike alone is worth about ₹190 per share (17 per cent upside), before any gains from homes, enterprise or technology exports. We recommend subscribe,” Antique Stock Broking said in a note.

Jio Platforms’ network runs on 360,000 towers against Bharti’s 346,000 and over 1 million route-km of fibre against 0.53 million, and it is the only Indian operator with nationwide 5G spectrum in all three bands (700 MHz, 3.3 GHz and 26 GHz). Its network carried 241 billion GB of data in FY26, against 101 billion GB on Bharti’s India mobile network. It also added more customers (36.2 million in FY26 against 11.7 million for Bharti’s mobile businesses) and has nearly twice as many home broadband customers (28.6 million against 14.7 million as of June 2026).  

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