The Indian stock exchanges will soon list the country’s largest IPO in rupees terms as Jio Platforms Limited is set to sell 270 million shares to raise up to $3.2 billion (INR 302 billion). Jio, the digital and telecom arm of the major conglomerate, Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), will open bidding for the general public from October 21 to October 23. This milestone IPO comes at a time when the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has called India the fastest-growing major economy, with projected GDP growth of 7 per cent.
The IPO is a fresh-issue-only deal, shared Akash Ambani, the managing director, in a press conference in Mumbai, ahead of the IPO launch. This means the existing shareholders, including Meta and Google, have decided to stay invested.
The IPO papers say the money will be used to repay their $2.8 billion (INR 275 billion) telecom-business debt.“The full proceeds will make us a net-debt-free company,” he announced. In addition to telecom, Jio Platforms offers a range of services in home broadband, digital entertainment (through Jio Hotstar, a Jio and Viacom18-Disney star merger), enterprise and tech.
Launched in 2016, the company entered as India’s 14th operator. Since then, Jio has proliferated its presence across the telecom sector through aggressive market penetration and pricing tactics. Jio’s entry made the telecom market in India fiercely competitive. Today, the company stands as one of only four major telecom service providers left in the country – Airtel, Vodafone Idea, and BSNL being the other three.
Ambani attributed the surge in Jio’s customer base to having identified a big supply gap in the market early on. “We saw it as our biggest opportunity… to change India from a data scarce nation to a data abundant nation,” he said.
Prior to Jio’s entry, India had 342.65 million internet subscribers, as reported in the parliament by the then telecom minister, Manoj Sinha. The growth since then has been staggering. Today, more than 1.11 billion people are connected to the internet, as per the official data shared by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI). With Jio alone having 533.3 million users, Ambani claims his company to be the “largest digital connectivity player in India.” To achieve this milestone, he said that at one point his company put up “a [network] tower every minute in a 12-hour work shift for 19 months.”
Notably, according to Ambani, India is also the country with the lowest mobile data prices globally, a feat he says his company played a significant role in achieving. Today, a customer can use one GB data through Jio at 4.9 rupees or $0.052, a striking drop from the 2016 price of $2.40 per GB. To compare, in the UK, a user currently pays $0.27 per GB, as per the data from cable.co.uk, placing the country 46th on mobile data affordability. The internet usage too, has grown remarkably in India over the years. TRAI reported that in 2016, an average internet user consumed 1.14 GB per month, by 2025-26 that figure was about 25.6 GB. Ambani says his own company delivers 43.7 GB per subscriber per month as of 2026.
The next on radar for Jio is bringing 6G to the country. “6G is on our horizon,” he said. “We’d deliver [6G] as a software upgrade, and not a new infrastructure build-out,” he added while expressing his support for the Government of India’s mission of Viksit Bharat (Developed India) 2047. The telecom company’s ambitions are backed by Reliance Group, the already-listed parent organization. Led by Mukesh Ambani, the family-managed conglomerate has more than 360,000 telecom towers and over one million kilometres of optical fibre across India.
“We will continue to evaluate strategic pathways that can support Jio’s long term growth, always guided by the principle of sustainable value creation,” said Mukesh Ambani, Chairman and Managing Director in the FY2025-26 integrated annual report.
The corporate juggernaut strives to further strengthen its dominance in the Indian telecom market, but an even more powerful competitor has its eyes on the share. Elon Musk, who wants to expand his satellite internet company, Starlink, recently accused Mukesh Ambani of blocking its entry in India. The accusations made on Musk-owned social platform, X, are being seen more as conjecture. Reliance has rejected Musk’s claims, highlighting that its own application for satellite internet is awaiting clearance.
“As the Government of India has stated, it applies the same process to every applicant, Indian or foreign. Jio's own satellite services await clearances,” it said. The statement also says that Reliance welcomes competition but every player “must abide by the laws and policies of the land.”
India’s Ministry of Communications have called its approval process fair and non-discriminatory. As per reports, the ministry is reviewing applications from Starlink and two other operators. At the India Mobile Congress 2026 held in New Delhi, Communications Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia said that his government doesn’t allow monopoly in any sector.
"As and when the government decides the charge system on the revenue basis, the spectrum will be assigned to them," he added.
With regulatory approvals still pending, it’ll be interesting to see how the competition between Starlink and Jio unfolds. For now, the numbers show that the former is yet to bring its services to India, while the latter is all set to make history through its landmark IPO.