Why Everyone Wants a Piece of Jio

India's biggest-ever IPO drew bids for about 22 times the shares on offer. Just over ten years ago, Jio didn't have a single paying customer. Here's how it got here.

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On the morning of October 21, India's biggest-ever public share sale opened: 30,000 crore rupees worth of shares in Jio Platforms. On its very first day, it was fully subscribed. By the time bidding closed, investors had asked for about 22 times the shares on offer, and there were more than one crore applications, a record for India.

Just over ten years ago, Jio didn't have a single paying customer. So how did it become the company everyone wants a piece of?

Before the launch 0:30

The story starts in 2010. Reliance bought a small company called Infotel for about 4,800 crore rupees. Infotel had just won something valuable: airwaves for high-speed 4G internet in every part of India.

Then came years of building quietly. Jio laid more than 250,000 kilometres of fibre-optic cable, enough to wrap around the Earth six times. It built a network for the internet first, where even voice calls ran as data. At the end of 2015, Jio switched on for its own employees and partners, to test the network before anyone else could use it.

The launch 1:10

On September 5, 2016, Jio opened to everyone. The offer was hard to believe: free 4G data and free calls until the end of the year, later extended to March 2017. People queued for SIM cards across the country. Jio signed up 16 million customers in its first month and passed 100 million in about 170 days.

When the free period ended, prices stayed very low. In 2014, a gigabyte of mobile data cost Indians about 269 rupees. By 2018, it was under 12 rupees, a fall of about 95 percent.

The shake-up 1:49

Cheap data changed the whole industry. In 2016, India had around 10 mobile companies. Airtel led with about a quarter of all users. Vodafone and Idea came next, and Jio was nowhere on the chart.

Then the field narrowed. Some companies merged, like Vodafone and Idea. Others sold out or shut down. Within three years, Jio was India's biggest mobile operator. Today, it's down to three big private players, plus the government-run BSNL.

For customers, that competition helped keep Indian data among the cheapest in the world.

India goes online 2:31

The biggest change was in how Indians lived. In 2014, the average user went through about a quarter of a gigabyte of data a month. By 2018, it was 7.5 gigabytes, almost 30 times more.

In 2017, Jio launched the JioPhone, a 4G phone sold for a refundable deposit. It brought people who couldn't afford a smartphone onto the internet. Video calls to family, online classes, paying a street vendor with a QR code: cheap data made all of that normal across India. Today, Jio has about 533 million customers.

The big investors 3:08

The world noticed. In 2020, with much of the world in lockdown, global companies lined up to buy into Jio Platforms. Facebook, now Meta, paid about 43,600 crore rupees for nearly 10 percent. Google paid about 33,700 crore for almost 8 percent. Big investment funds joined in too. In total, Jio raised more than $20 billion that year.

They paid around 488 rupees a share. At the IPO's top price of 1,119 rupees, those stakes have more than doubled in value. Now it's everyone else's turn.

The IPO 3:48

So what are investors actually buying? A company that made about 30,000 crore rupees in profit last year, up 15 percent. Its income grew 16 percent to nearly 1.5 lakh crore.

At the top price, the whole company is valued at about 10.3 lakh crore rupees, more than 100 billion dollars. That makes it the largest IPO India has ever seen, ahead of Hyundai's in 2024.

And this is all new money. Nobody is cashing out. Most of it, about 27,500 crore rupees, will pay down Jio's debt, leaving more room to invest in what comes next.

What comes next 4:25

Jio shares start trading on October 28. The next chapter is already being built: 5G across the country, high-speed internet for homes, and AI services for hundreds of millions of users.

Ten years ago, Jio bet that India was ready to go online. Now, with more than a crore applications, everyone wants a piece of that bet.