Reliance Jio heads for record India IPO but it hasn’t earned its internet platform tag yet
Jio changed the telecom game in India and attracted billions from the world’s top investors, but it remains a Reliance play (and that’s probably a good thing)
Welcome back to Asia Tech Review, your curated digest to keep up to date with tech news across Asia.
Today, we’re all about Reliance Jio, the disruptive mobile operator that modernised India’s mobile landscape a decade ago and raised billions of dollars from Facebook, Google and the world’s investors. Its initial IPO prospectus dropped last Friday so let’s peek into the black box. We know you value brevity and have tried to keep this issue short, sweet and insightful.
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Unpacking the business behind Reliance Jio’s IPO pitch
As an outsider looking into India, Reliance Jio fascinates me. The mobile operator was launched in 2016 by Reliance Industries (RIL), its $190 billion-valued parent, and it quickly revamped India’s mobile scene by offering free calls and cheap data on the country’s first 4G-only network.
The rollout, the fastest of any network anywhere in the world, sent rivals scrambling, prices falling and India consumers moving to all-you-can-eat data packages. That created the conditions for a domestic ecosystem of consumer apps, services and startups to bloom.
Jio wasn’t done there, and its ambition moved up the stack. Beyond providing data, it built video and music content, and personal storage. There’s also fixed broadband to complement mobile, enterprise plans and plans for satellite broadband, data centres, AI glasses (because why not?!) and more.
The disruptive nature of Jio attracted a glut of overseas investors keen to take a slice. Jio announced nearly $20 billion in investments, at a valuation of $65 billion, during a hectic period between April and July 2020. The deals included:
April 2020: Facebook invested $5.7 billion
May 2020: Silver Lake invested $750 million; KKR invested $1.5 billion
June 2020: General Atlantic invested $870 million: PIF invested $1.5 billion; TPG invested $600 million; Mubadala invested $1.2 billion
July 2020: Google invested $4.5 billion
That unprecedented fundraising spree was bookended by US tech giants with a number of the highest-profile growth funds in the world taking part. It certainly put India on the map.
The combination of innovation, capital and major names, explains why I’m excited to dip into Jio Platforms, as the company is officially called, after it dropped its IPO papers ahead of a much-anticipated listing that could be the largest IPO in Indian history.
Telecom operator or internet platform?
Let’s get straight to the fundamentals.
Jio is headed to the public markets with annual operating revenue of ₹1.47 trillion ($15.5 billion) with net profit of ₹300.5 billion, or $3.2 billion. It plans to raise about ₹37,700 crore, or $4 billion, through a fresh issue of 270 million shares, which is roughly 2.9% of post-issue shares. That would value the business at around ₹13 lakh crore, or $138 billion.
Those are huge numbers that reflect Jio pitching itself as a technology platform based on its sheer scale. It has more than 524 million customers, carries around 60% of India’s wireless data traffic and has pushed itself into adjacent services and devices. It aspires to play a role in India’s digital economy that is far larger than simply selling mobile plans.
Can it upsell that half a billion-plus user base on video streaming, music plans, personal cloud, quick commerce, groceries or more? The charitable case is that it can, or there’s no reason that it can’t, but it hasn’t yet. It hasn’t all been successful, a number of ventures have failed and more ambitious but risky rollouts are on their way.
Despite that, the default view for this filing is that we are looking at a mobile telecom provider. The document shows comparisons to rivals Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea, not the global internet platform story that overseas investors likely bought.
Jio is taking a different approach to the norm with a fresh issue, offering new shares for sale rather than unloading its own. Over 70% of the proceeds (₹27,500 crore or $2.9 billion) will be used to pay off loans, with the remainder put towards very blandly labeled “general corporate purposes.”
We know Jio is publicly talking about making a big investment into AI, like most companies, so that will likely be a big part of the general plan, but paying off debts makes sense. Jio had to build a national network, and that is expensive. Reducing that debt before being public makes the company cleaner for public investors, even if that’s not the most glamorous plan.
The numbers suggest Jio is past the most expensive part of its network spending. Cash capex fell from ₹535.1 billion in FY24 to ₹341.8 billion in FY26, roughly US$5.65 billion to US$3.61 billion. EBITDA less cash capex jumped from ₹14.5 billion to ₹420.7 billion, or about US$153 million to US$4.44 billion.
Incredible scale
Jio’s operating scale is something to behold given it is less than a decade old. Its total customers reached 524.4 million, with monthly data consumption of 42.3GB per customer. In 2015, one year before it launched, the average Indian mobile customer used just 2GB of data per month, and the total number of mobile internet users was estimated at just over 300 million.
While Jio played a major part in changing those numbers, its monetisation isn’t much to shout about. Average revenue per user is just ₹214 per month, or about US$2.26. Airtel’s 482 million customers spend 20% more on average (₹257 per month) but consume nearly 25% less data, 31.4GB. That’s partly because it went after a higher-paying user base, but it also indicates scope to grow for Jio.
On that note, growth hasn’t been plain sailing. Jio added just 6.4 million net customers in its FY 2015, but last year was a healthier 36.2 million. Its fixed-line service fared better, more than doubling to 27.1 million customers between 2024 and 2026. That actually gives a strong base to upsell value-add services, but it’s once again less of a story to sell to investors.
Daddy rules the roost
For all of Jio’s breakthroughs, big-name backing and a potentially record IPO, the company remains dependent on its parent, RIL.
Daddy provides the capital, distribution, talent, strategy and, perhaps most importantly, patience for an expensive project. RIL is the sole distributor for prepaid Jio services, and FY26 revenue received in advance from it for recharge vouchers was 77% of operating revenue. In addition, other related-party purchases, fees and distribution expenses bring in a further 7.4%. Jio remains deeply embedded inside the broader Reliance machine
There, of course, huge benefits to a close relationship with such a dominant company, but that has to be factored in for investors. The other side of the deal is that RIL retains significant control. It holds more than 66% of shares before the issue, and that will drop by less than two percent post-IPO.
Furthermore, Meta and Google will forfeit their board nomination rights once the company goes public, neither firm has a nominee director. But if you want to see confidence, they’re not selling their shares.
Effectively, Reliance is giving retail investors direct exposure to the new and shiny technology jewel that sits within its business.
That might appeal as a proxy for AI adoption in India, the continued growth of the digital economy or a ride on the train as one of India’s largest companies continues to modernise in today’s online world. Buy it or not, this mammoth listing could have a bigger impact if it can breathe new life and freshness into India’s IPO pipeline after other major listings stalled.
Deals
Asia-focused prediction markets and perpetual futures platform TurboFlow raised $6 million led by Pantera Capital [The Block]
Tencent is reportedly in talks to exit minority stakes in several Japanese game studios, potentially at a loss, as it reassesses its global portfolio [Bloomberg]
Singapore’s H3 Zoom, which uses AI for building and asset inspection, closed a $3.6 million Series A funding round [H3 Zoom]
ChemT Biotechnology, a Singapore-based AI biotech startup, announced a $4 million seed round led by Wavemaker [FinSMEs]
Markets
Used-car platform Carro is once again being linked with an IPO filing in the US that could raise $500 million, the company may also consider a secondary listing in Singapore. This is no doubt a listing that would boost Southeast Asia, but we’ve heard many reports of its plans and to date none have come to fruition. [Bloomberg]
In other news:
Japan is building AI dialogue frameworks with nations like France and India to reduce its dependence on US and Chinese technologies [Nikkei Asia]
Lazada has reportedly cut 5% of Southeast Asia staff, including many in Singapore, following similar job cuts made by close rival Shopee [The Straits Times]
Amazon is expanding its conversational AI assistant Alexa+ to India, where it is inviting users to test a Hindi-language version [TechCrunch]
Tools for Humanity, Sam Altman’s iris-scanning identity startup behind Worldcoin, hired law firms last year to look into apparent links between its business and a company linked to a South African businessman accused of involvement in transnational cyber-fraud schemes [Business Insider]
ComfortDelGro is launching public rides on its Zig Driverless shuttles in Punggol, its second autonomous public service globally after a robotaxi pilot in China [Technode Global]
Forty-eight Chinese iOS developers filed a complaint with China’s State Administration for Market Regulation, accusing Apple of breaking a promise to offer the country its lowest App Store commission rates [South China Morning Post]
Shenzhen-based supercomputer LineShine reclaimed the title of world’s fastest for China, posting results more than 20% quicker than El Capitan, the US system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California that had topped the rankings since November 2024 [New York Times]