Ambani hands the keys to India’s biggest-ever IPO to his children

MUMBAI: Mukesh Ambani turned Reliance’s 49th annual general meeting into a coronation on Friday, confirming that Jio Platforms’ board has waved through its draft red herring prospectus, filed the same day with SEBI, the BSE and the NSE. The filing puts to bed months of speculation and formally launches India’s largest-ever public listing — and in the same breath, Ambani handed the steering wheel to the next generation, confirming that Akash, Isha and Anant Ambani are running the IPO themselves.

The structure is lean and deliberate: a 100 per cent fresh issue of up to 27 crore equity shares, face value Rs 10 apiece, with nothing sold by existing shareholders. Street estimates put the raise at around $4 billion, or roughly Rs 35,000-40,000 crore, against a target valuation of Rs 12-15 lakh crore, or $120-180 billion — a number that would put Jio among the most valuable listed entities anywhere in the democratic world. Every rupee raised goes straight onto Jio’s own balance sheet, earmarked for deep-tech capex, debt reduction and network expansion, rather than into the pockets of early investors.

And the underlying business gives the valuation some teeth. Jio Platforms closed FY26 with revenue from operations of Rs 1,72,317 crore, up roughly 14.5 per cent on the year, and net profit of Rs 30,053 crore, up around 15 per cent. The subscriber base has swelled past 524 million, with 268 million of those on 5G — reportedly the largest 5G user base outside China — while ARPU climbed 3.8 per cent to Rs 214, helped along by tariff hikes and premium upgrades. JioAirFiber, meanwhile, has raced past 13 million subscribers on the back of an installation rate nudging 60,000 homes a day.

Akash Ambani used his slot at the podium to land a second blow: JioStar, the media combine born of the Viacom18-Disney Star India merger, now boasts JioHotstar, the first paid Indian OTT platform to cross 1 billion downloads. The numbers behind that milestone are formidable — Rs 34,917 crore in full-year revenue, Rs 5,842 crore in EBITDA, Rs 3,434 crore in net profit, north of 500 million monthly active users and a linear TV reach of over 810 million viewers. During the ICC men’s T20 World Cup final, the platform clocked a peak concurrency of 72.5 million simultaneous live streams — the largest live digital audience ever recorded anywhere, full stop.

None of this is being pitched as plain old telecom. Akash Ambani showed off the Jio Call Agent, an AI voice assistant built directly into the network rather than bolted on as an app, capable of live transcription, multi-speaker call summaries and even booking a cab mid-conversation. Behind it sits a 168-megawatt AI-ready data centre in Jamnagar, built with Meta, feeding a coming suite of homegrown large language models — alongside early plans for an Indian low-earth-orbit satellite constellation designed to leapfrog physical fibre limitations in rural India altogether.

With the DRHP now sitting at SEBI, the regulatory clock starts ticking, and institutional money is already shuffling in anticipation of a sector-wide re-rating. Existing Reliance shareholders have been promised a slice of the action once book-building details are finalised. One thing is already clear, though: Mukesh Ambani isn’t merely floating a telecom company. He is floating the engine room of digital India itself — and handing his children the controls just as the markets start paying attention.