Jio Platforms replaces CEO ahead of record $4bn IPO

MUMBAI: Reliance has pulled a switcheroo at the top of Jio Platforms just as it prepares to pull off the largest stock offering in Indian history. Kiran Thomas is out as chief executive; Pankaj Pawar is in. The reshuffle, confirmed in draft papers filed with market regulator Sebi in June, was done and dusted months before the public got wind of it. Thomas quit on 23 March, and Pawar took charge the very next day.

Pawar, 53, is no outsider. He has been with the Reliance Group since 2000, racking up close to three decades building and scaling the conglomerate’s consumer and digital businesses, and continues to double up as managing director of Reliance Jio Infocomm. Thomas, by contrast, has vanished from the paperwork entirely: despite once serving as president of Reliance Industries and fronting every annual general meeting since Jio’s 2016 launch, he is conspicuously absent from the list of key managerial personnel in the draft prospectus. An email to Jio seeking comment went unanswered, and draw your own conclusions from that.

The boardroom furniture tells its own story. Mukesh Ambani chairs Jio Platforms as non-executive director; Manoj Modi joins as non-executive director; son Akash Ambani is managing director; and siblings Isha and Anant round out the board as non-executive directors. Family first, evidently.

The timing is no accident. Jio Platforms is gunning for roughly $4bn (Rs 37,700 crore), which would value the business at a scarcely believable $137bn. The draft red herring prospectus proposes a fresh issue of up to 27 crore shares, about 2.9 per cent of post-issue equity, with pricing to be thrashed out through the usual book-building song and dance. Neither the price band nor the total offer size has been revealed yet, so the real fireworks are still to come.

Should it land, the float would eclipse Hyundai Motor India’s Rs 27,870 crore effort from 2024 to become the biggest IPO the country has ever seen. That is quite a claim for a business whose telecom arm, Reliance Jio Infocomm, is already the world’s second-largest mobile operator by subscribers, trailing only China Mobile, and one that counts Meta and Google among its biggest foreign backers. Not to be outdone, the National Stock Exchange has separately filed to raise up to $3.3bn of its own, making this a bumper season for Indian listings all round.

Jio, of course, has form when it comes to charming deep pockets. Back in 2020 it hoovered up more than $20bn from the likes of Meta, Google, KKR, Silver Lake and General Atlantic, in a round that pegged the company’s worth at $57bn-65bn. Five years on, with a new man at the helm and Wall Street-sized ambitions in tow, Reliance is betting the market’s appetite has only grown sharper. Watch this space: the price band, when it drops, will tell everyone just how hungry.