JIO PLATFORMS, the digital arm of Reliance Industries, filed papers for its initial public offering (IPO) on Friday, beginning the process for what could become India's biggest stock market listing.
Billionaire Mukesh Ambani announced the move, with Reliance saying in a stock exchange filing that Jio Platforms will issue up to 270 million shares at 10 rupees ($0.11) each as part of the listing.
The pricing was not immediately disclosed, but local media reports have suggested the IPO could raise as much as $4 billion and value the company at more than $100 billion.
If that happens, it would surpass the previous record for an Indian listing set by Hyundai's India unit in 2024.
Reliance is India's most valuable company by market capitalisation and has business interests ranging from oil refining to green energy.
Jio Platforms operates across sectors including AI and enterprise network services, but is best known for its subsidiary Jio Infocomm, India's largest telecoms company by subscribers.
"The proposed listing of Jio will demonstrate to the world that India can build technology companies of global scale, global capability and global value," Ambani, Reliance's chairman, said in a televised speech to shareholders.
Jio launched its wireless carrier service a decade ago and rapidly gained customers from rivals Bharti Airtel and Vodafone through aggressive discounts.
Experts credit the company's free 4G offers with enabling hundreds of thousands of Indians to access data-heavy services such as YouTube and Netflix for the first time.
Today, Jio has more than 520 million subscribers and accounts for about 60 per cent of India's data traffic.
Jio Platforms and Reliance's wider digital business have been central to Ambani's efforts to diversify the conglomerate beyond its core oil-refining operations.
In 2020, the company raised more than $20 billion from investors and technology companies, including Meta and Alphabet, as it expanded its digital ecosystem, which includes an online payments app and a streaming service.
