ewsba.se
Global investors and sovereign wealth funds, including the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Qatar Investment Authority, GIC Pte. Ltd, Norges Bank Investment Management and Mubadala Investment Co., are queueing up for allocations in the anchor book of Jio Platforms Ltd’s public offering, alongside asset managers BlackRock Inc. and FMR LLC, according to four people familiar with the matter.
About 15 domestic asset managers, including HDFC Mutual Fund, SBI Mutual Fund, ICICI Prudential Mutual Fund, Nippon Life India Asset Management and Motilal Oswal Asset Management, have also submitted indications of interest for a share of Jio's ₹8,000-crore anchor book, the people said on the condition of anonymity.
The asset management arms of Goldman Sachs and Franklin Templeton are also vying for a slice of the pie, the people said.
While ADIA, Motilal and Norges declined to comment, representatives of Jio's parent company, Reliance Industries Ltd, as well as other institutional investors and fund managers, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The telecom giant's parent filed its red herring prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Board of India on Wednesday for an initial public offering (IPO) that will raise around ₹ 30,200 crore, or about $3.2 billion, at the upper end of the 1,069-1,119 per share price band announced.
The anchor allocation window, which precedes the public subscription period, allows institutional entities to secure share allotments before the main issue opens.
Under capital market regulator rules, up to 60% of the portion reserved for qualified institutional buyers (QIBs) can be allocated to anchor investors. Half of the anchor portion is reserved for domestic mutual funds.
Final share allocations for the anchor book are scheduled to be finalized ahead of the opening of the retail and non-institutional bidding windows.
The subscription window opens on 21 October and closes on 23 October. Shares are slated to start trading on the exchanges on 28 October.
Jio operates digital services and telecommunications infrastructure across India. Existing equity holders in Jio Platforms include Meta Platforms Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google, KKR & Co., Silver Lake and General Atlantic.
At a press conference in Navi Mumbai on Wednesday, which saw Anant Ambani, Shloka Ambani and other key CXOs of Jio Platforms seated in the front row, Uday Kotak, chairman of left lead merchant banker Kotak Investment Banking, said, “Reliance Industries (...) has always believed in making it attractive for investors to be long-term with the group."
Anant Ambani is an executive director on the board of Reliance Industries and non-executive director on the board of Jio Platforms, while Shloka is the wife of managing director Akash Ambani.
On the company's prospects, Kotak said: "Akash Ambani has discussed in detail (at institutional roadshows) the various trends of Jio Platforms, including scale, growth, and the fact that significant capital expenditure has already been done and it's already put in place.”
Kotak said the price band factored in investor feedback from the roadshows, and it aimed to keep the offering attractive for investors. "We believe (the price band) is appropriate. We priced for investors to have returns in this IPO," he said.
Jio Platforms' IPO comes at a time when revenue per user has stagnated across quarters. The average revenue per user (Arpu) is a closely watched industry metric that tracks paying users. The firm's monthly Arpu rose marginally quarter-on-quarter to ₹215.6 from ₹214 at the end of March. In the previous quarter too, the growth was flat.
Commenting on this sluggish growth trend, Akash Ambani said, "Today, our Arpu is measured strictly against our licenced services, but we believe we can achieve higher realization per user from offerings outside of our licenced businesses—one key example being our voice AI service."
Ambani said the company aims to deliver more value by launching new services across its customer base and extracting value from it. "While we always retain the ability to raise prices, our goal is to deliver more services to keep customers satisfied, rather than relying on price hikes as our primary lever for Arpu growth."
Analysts, however, expect the organic increase in Arpu to be restricted going forward as smartphone prices rise, particularly at the entry level. Higher prices could slow feature-phone-to-smartphone upgrades and weaken the premiumization trend.
Agnidev is a business journalist with over two years of reporting experience tracking the intersection of capital, policy, and corporate strategy in India.<br><br>He joined Mint in December 2025, after a stint at NDTV Profit (erstwhile BQ Prime). At Mint, Agnidev focuses on the high-stakes world of the Indian capital market, specialising in mergers and acquisitions, burgeoning IPOs, and the investment banking industry.<br><br>Backed by a rigorous, data-driven approach, Agnidev frequently breaks news on the valuation cycles, deal pipelines and listing strategies of India’s most prominent companies. His reportage offers deep dives into the operational health of market leaders across the corporate landscape, providing readers with a clear-eyed view of institutional growth.<br><br>He has reported on major issues like India's derivatives frenzy, IPO froth, the competitive quick commerce industry, the real-money gaming ban, and has broken investigative stories related to scandals such as IndusInd Bank's accounting manipulation and the Gensol-BluSmart fiasco.<br><br>As a reporter, he brings stories that ultimately affect your stock market investments, and tries to bring clarity and brevity in a field that is often filled with jargon and noise.
Sneha Shah is the editor for deals and startups at Mint. Starting off her career in India’s financial capital as a cub reporter for the Mid-day newspaper in the mid-2000s, she later moved on to decode balance sheets and follow the money trail for some of the leading pink publications in the country. She has been covering India’s deals ecosystem for nearly two decades now, closely tracking private- and public-market funding, startups, private equity, venture capital, and investment banking. From breaking some of the biggest deal stories of the past to doing some incisive deep-dives into the latest trends and turnarounds in the industry, she has witnessed the phenomenal growth and transformation of the country’s investment ecosystem from really close quarters. A graduate in journalism, she has worked with The Economic Times, Financial Chronicle, VCCircle and Mid-Day before starting her second stint at Mint in 2022. As a keen observer of India’s startups ecosystem, she aspires to write a book some day, chronicling some of the most inspiring stories the industry has seen so far in its remarkable journey.
Catch all the Business News , Market News , Breaking News Events and Latest News Updates on Live Mint. Download The Mint News App to get Daily Market Updates.