India’s Jio lures marquee investors to IPO anchor book, bids top $25 billion

MUMBAI, Oct 19 : Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance said on Monday that Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, BlackRock and Fidelity were among investors who bid in the anchor book of its record $3.2 billion Jio Platforms IPO, which two sources said drew more than $25 billion in demand.

The telecoms, ​cloud and AI group on Monday opened its record initial public offering to institutional investors who can bid for up to 30 per cent of the offering exclusively earmarked for them, before the issue opens for public subscription on Wednesday. 

Jio Platforms allocated shares worth over 81 billion rupees ($853.31 million) to anchor investors, a company filing showed on Monday.

State-run insurer Life Insurance Corporation, French lender BNP Paribas, JPMorgan, India's largest private-sector lender HDFC Bank were among the other institutions allotted shares in the IPO anchor book.

The bids drawn were over 30 times the quota reserved for anchor investors, a source told Reuters.

Jio upended India's telecoms market in 2016 by offering free voice calls and cheap data and soon became the country's biggest mobile operator. It now has more than 500 million subscribers and competes with Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea.

Its listing is seen as a test of what global investors will pay for that scale and for Jio's expansion into cloud and AI.

Led by Mukesh Ambani's son ​Akash Ambani, Jio operates Reliance Industries' telecom and digital businesses, spanning mobile services, fixed broadband, ​cloud, entertainment, ⁠enterprise technology and AI offerings.

Jio's IPO follows September's listing of the National Stock Exchange of India, underscoring investor appetite for large offerings in the Indian market. It will be the first offering by Reliance since its listing of Reliance Petroleum in 2006.

Year-to-date Indian IPO proceeds rose 8.3 per cent ​to $12.65 billion compared with the same period last year, LSEG data shows.

A successful IPO would place Jio Platforms among ‌the top ⁠four Indian listed companies by market capitalisation, behind its parent Reliance, its rival Bharti Airtel and the country's largest private lender HDFC Bank.

Jio plans to use up to 275 billion Indian rupees ($2.90 billion) of the net proceeds to repay or prepay borrowings of its telecom subsidiary, Reliance Jio Infocomm.