$77bn of bids for a $3.2bn offer: Jio's IPO is India's most oversubscribed yet
Mukesh Ambani's Jio Platforms closed its share sale on Friday covered 22.19 times, an Indian record. Institutions asked for 70 times what was on offer, retail buyers under three. Trading starts on Wednesday 28 October.
Jio Platforms set out to sell about ₹30,213 crore of shares, roughly $3.2bn. By the time the offer closed on Friday it had drawn bids worth ₹7.4 lakh crore, or about $77bn. No Indian share sale has ever been chased this hard.
The telecoms arm of Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance group was covered 22.19 times overall, from 13.9 million applications, which is also a national record.
Who actually wanted it
Demand was very uneven, and that is the story in the chart:
- Institutional buyers: 70.55 times the shares set aside for them
- Large non-institutional investors: 7.16 times
- Retail investors: 2.77 times
In other words, the funds queued round the block. Small savers turned up too, but with much less enthusiasm than the headline record suggests. Before the offer even opened, anchor investors including the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and BlackRock had taken $853m of stock.
What Jio is worth
The price range was ₹1,065 to ₹1,119 a share, which at the top values the company at about $108.3bn.
Jio had 524 million subscribers in June, making it India’s biggest operator and the world’s second-largest single-country telecoms company after China Mobile. Up to ₹27,500 crore of the proceeds will pay down debt at Reliance Jio Infocomm, with the rest going on capital spending.
What happens next
The shares start trading on Wednesday 28 October. The question is whether the institutional queue turns into a first-day pop, or whether all that demand was already in the price.
At a time when Lisbon’s stock exchange is losing listings, India is showing there is plenty of money around for the right debut. Official investor material sits on Reliance’s investor relations portal.
By Beatriz Mota
Chart: Tugadaily, offer data