Jio Platforms' Record IPO Closes 22 Times Covered, Retail 2.7 Times
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Jio Platforms' Record IPO Closes 22 Times Covered, Retail 2.7 Times
Institutions bid 70.55 times their quota for the ₹30,213 crore issue, and about ₹27,500 crore of it will repay Reliance Jio Infocomm's borrowings.
Jio Platforms' ₹30,213 crore IPO closed on Oct. 23 subscribed 22.19 times overall, but retail investors bid for only 2.72 times the shares reserved for them while institutional buyers bid 70.55 times. The issue is all new shares, and about ₹27,500 crore of it will repay borrowings of Reliance Jio Infocomm, the telecom subsidiary, leaving roughly ₹2,700 crore for everything else.
The final-day figures come from Inc42's tally of BSE data as of 7:45 p.m. IST. Bids totalled 438.26 crore shares against 19.75 crore on offer. Inc42 reports it as India's largest IPO, ahead of Hyundai Motor India's ₹27,870 crore issue.
The subscription, category by category
Overall cover hides a 26-fold gap between the most and least eager buyers, by our arithmetic from 70.55 and 2.72.
| Category | Subscription | Shares bid (crore) | Shares on offer (crore) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Qualified institutional buyers | 70.55x | 345.76 | 4.90 |
| Non-institutional investors | 14x | 51.04 | 3.64 |
| Retail | 2.72x | 23.12 | 8.50 |
| Overall | 22.19x | 438.26 | 19.75 |
Within the non-institutional group, bids above ₹10 lakh were covered 15.89 times and bids of ₹2 lakh to ₹10 lakh 10.22 times. Employees bid 2.93 times and the shareholder quota 7.60 times, Inc42 reported. The issue raised ₹8,109.8 crore from anchor investors at ₹1,119 for about 7.25 crore shares, with participants including HDFC, ICICI Prudential and SBI mutual funds, BlackRock, the Government of Singapore and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.
A caution on the table: Groww's terms page says non-institutional investors get at least 35 percent and retail at least 15 percent. The share counts in Inc42's data run the other way, with retail's 8.50 crore reserved shares more than double the non-institutional 3.64 crore. We have used the share counts, which come from exchange data, and treat Groww's percentages as likely transposed.
What a retail investor is paying for
The price band was ₹1,065 to ₹1,119 a share, with a lot of 12 shares, so the minimum retail bid at the upper band was ₹13,428, according to Groww. At the upper band Inc42 puts the company at about ₹10.3 lakh crore, roughly $108 billion. The issue is 27 crore new shares.
By our arithmetic, ₹30,213 crore against a ₹10.3 lakh crore valuation means the IPO sells about 2.9 percent of the company. The business behind it posted FY26 operating revenue of about ₹1.47 lakh crore, up nearly 15 percent, and net profit of ₹30,049 crore, up 15.1 percent. That is about 34 times FY26 earnings and 7 times revenue at the upper band.
Reliance Jio Infocomm had 533.3 million customers on June 30, 2026, and its network carried about 60 percent of India's wireless data traffic in FY26, Inc42 reported.
- QIB70.55 x
- Overall22.19 x
- Non-institutional14 x
- Shareholder7.6 x
- Employee2.93 x
- Retail2.72 x
Source: Inc42, BSE data as of 7:45 p.m. IST on Oct. 23, 2026
Debt repayment is the use of funds
Inc42 says about ₹27,500 crore, or 91 percent of the ₹30,213 crore, goes to prepaying some borrowings of Reliance Jio Infocomm, with the rest for general corporate purposes. Public investors are therefore paying mostly for a balance-sheet clean-up at a subsidiary, not for network build-out. Neither source says how much debt Reliance Jio Infocomm carries or what rate the prepaid loans bear.
The offer had 19 book-running lead managers, Groww said, among them Kotak Mahindra Capital, Morgan Stanley, BofA Securities, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan. The pricing looks nothing like the smaller listings we have covered: Zetwerk closed 8 percent below its issue price, and the Instamart and Blinkit results at Swiggy show a ₹895 crore loss beside a ₹184 crore profit. Jio is priced as a profit stream, at about 34 times earnings, rather than as a growth story.
Key dates after the close
Basis of allotment is set for Oct. 26, refunds and share credit for Oct. 27, and listing on the NSE and BSE for Oct. 28, per Groww's tentative schedule. Half the anchor shares are free to sell on Nov. 24 and the rest on Jan. 23, 2027. The listing-day price will show whether 2.72 times retail cover was enough demand once the 70.55 times institutional bids turn into allotted shares.
Sources
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