India’s largest initial public offering (IPO) opens October 21, and investors in Tokyo, Singapore and Hong Kong are being asked a simple question: What is a Jio customer’s monthly bill worth?
Jio Platforms, the Reliance-owned mobile carrier with some 524 million India-based customers, is selling 270 million new shares at 1,065 to 1,119 rupees each to raise up to US$3.2 billion at a valuation of up to $108.3 billion.
The IPO’s marketing leans heavily on artificial intelligence, satellites and a so-called “digital ecosystem.” The prospectus tells a blunter story: The average Indian customer pays only 214 rupees (US$2.22) a month in tariffs, a rate ripe for hiking.
On September 1, 2016, Mukesh Ambani told Reliance shareholders that voice calls on Jio would be absolutely free and that “the era of paying for voice calls is ending,” local publication Mint recently recalled. A decade later, that monthly bill is still Jio’s top asset.
Jio earned 1.47 trillion rupees in revenue and 300.5 billion rupees in after-tax profit in the year ended March 2026, with an EBITDA margin of 51.9%, The Hindu reported from the IPO’s prospectus. Cash left after capital spending reached 420.7 billion rupees, up from 14.5 billion two years earlier, Moneycontrol reported.
By any financial measure, Jio is a mature, cash-generating machine. At a valuation of roughly 10 trillion rupees, the shares are priced at about 34 times profit. Rival Bharti Airtel is valued at about 11 trillion rupees and earns more per customer at 257 rupees per month. The two figures, however, aren’t strictly comparable.
So where would growth come from to justify Jio’s high 34x multiple? Not likely from new subscribers. Jio added 36.2 million customers in the year to March, reaching 524.4 million, Hindustan Times reported.
Investment bank Nomura, quoted by CNBC, says India’s era of “easy subscriber gains” in the mobile space is ending and tariff increases are likely to become “the primary driver of earnings growth.”
In other words, Jio IPO investors are being asked to pay now for price increases that haven’t yet been announced. The stakes are easy to calculate. A 10-rupee rise in monthly average revenue per unit (ARPU) across Jio’s 524.4 million customers would add about 63 billion rupees in annual revenue, roughly a fifth of last year’s profit. The company’s ballyhooed AI roadmap offers nothing comparable.
The IPO prospectus earmarks up to 275 billion rupees, about 91% of the 302 billion to be raised, to repay borrowings at the telecom unit. That is, the new capital would be used mostly to retire old debt rather than to finance new AI and satellite ambitions that carry the sales pitch to IPO investors.
The rest is scheduled to go to general corporate purposes, including capital spending. Sahi reported from the filing that Jio’s return on average capital employed slipped to 10.76% in fiscal 2026. On that measure, a company priced like a next-generation technology platform is earning only a utility’s return.
Significantly, no existing Jio investor is selling. Among them are Meta, Alphabet, Mubadala and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which together put $20.5 billion into about a third of the company in 2020, at valuations of $57 billion to $65 billion, according to Reuters.
At the top of the new range, their stakes are worth 1.7 to 1.9 times their entry valuations. The American technology giants and sovereign funds are holding, not selling, while new money is being asked to buy in at a price already below the $130 billion valuation floated a year ago, CNBC reported.
The public float is about 3% of the company’s value, based on the $3.2 billion to be raised, so a small slice of shares will conceivably set the price for the whole. Meanwhile, Jio’s revenue flows through a single channel.
Reliance Retail is the sole distributor of Jio’s prepaid services, and prepaid revenue through it made up 77.08% of consolidated revenue, The Hindu reported. Minority shareholders will own a company whose parent, Reliance Industries, controls its main sales channel.
The IPO filing is frank about what could blunt the tariff hike strategy. Jio warns that India’s data-protection and telecom rules may limit how it can monetize data. A company that can’t easily turn its audience into advertising revenue must convert it into higher bills.
Elon Musk, who called Jio “monopolistic” last week, has made satellite competition with it a live question. Indeed, geopolitics are raising the IPO’s risk. Jio is the largest operator in a market where Musk’s Starlink wants to enter, and Indian regulators, not the IPO’s order book, will ultimately decide the contest.
Currently, Jio carries 60% of India’s mobile data traffic. If Starlink wins approval to sell satellite broadband in India, regulators will have a competitor to point to, and may thus scrutinize Jio’s price increases more closely.
So the test for Asian investors is not whether Jio is a technology company. Rather, it depends on what the shares are worth if Jio’s next price rise is smaller or comes later than the market expects. At a valuation of 34 times earnings, there is little room for error or deflated expectations.
If ARPU rises toward 250 rupees per month without losing market share, the price will look modest. If not, the valuation must rest on Jio’s AI story, which has yet to earn a margin to match.
A decade ago, Jio said the era of paying for calls was ending. Its IPO now asks investors to bet that paying more for those same mobile services is the future.
Sidhhant Kapai is an Indian writer and journalist whose commentary on business, technology and democratic institutions appears in The Hindu, The Indian Express, The Central Chronicle, Navbharat, Bandra Buzz and Asia Times. A three-time gold award winner of the Queen’s Commonwealth Essay Competition and recognized by the Obama Foundation as one of India’s young emerging leaders, he founded the creative practice VAARYA Creative. He is an admitted scholar to Columbia University, where he is researching the gap between what institutions say and what their records show.