BBC:
India’s biggest telecom giant, the Meta and Google-backed Jio Platforms, is set to make its stock market debut on Wednesday.
Despite a bruising spell for Indian markets, its historic $3.2bn initial public offering (IPO) – the country’s largest ever – has drawn overwhelming demand from top global fund managers, domestic institutions and mom-and-pop retail investors.
Bids outstripped the shares on offer within hours of subscriptions opening on 21 October.
Owned by Asia’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, Jio is one of India’s most consequential companies, with half a billion people subscribing to its cheap mobile data. But its meteoric rise has also been dogged by controversy.
The company burst onto India’s crowded telecom scene in 2016, offering throwaway tariffs that got millions of Indians hooked to the internet.
But its launch led to a huge disruption in the telecom sector. A market once crowded with 17 operators shrunk to an oligopoly of just three, with critics accusing the deep-pocketed company of waging a price war that pushed rivals out of business.
More recently, Elon Musk criticised Ambani, calling him the “real boss of India”, suggesting that Jio was trying to thwart Starlink’s entry into India. Reliance dismissed the allegations saying it welcomed competition from Musk.
For all the scrutiny it has faced over the last decade, Jio’s discounted data plans have been a bedrock of India’s digital revolution, spawning a huge digital economy and democratising online payments, food delivery and e-commerce in Asia’s third-biggest economy.
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