At 10:18 on Friday morning, India’s biggest-ever public issue was subscribed 5.98 times. By 3:14 in the afternoon, it had doubled. The Jio IPO closed its three-day bidding window today, with investors chasing about twelve times the shares on offer, ending a week in which Jio Platforms’ Rs 30,213 crore issue behaved less like a share sale and more like a coronation.
How the Jio IPO’s final day played out
The day moved like a tape, and the tape only went up. At 10:18 am, Moneycontrol’s live blog put overall subscription at 5.98 times. By 12:57 pm, BSE data cited by Livemint had it at 7.64 times. At 1:30 pm, Fortune India reported 9 times, on bids for 177.58 crore shares worth Rs 1.76 lakh crore. By 2:20 pm it was 10.68 times. And at 3:14 pm, exchange data showed bids for 241.90 crore shares against 19.75 crore on offer: 12.25 times, per Moneycontrol.
Two days earlier, the issue had sold out within 100 minutes of the gates opening on Day 1. Friday’s tape suggests the opening rush was only the warm-up act.
The institutions feasted. Retail watched.
The split between who bid and who stayed out tells the sharper story. Qualified institutional buyers, the pension funds and mutual funds, subscribed their portion 31.68 times, bidding for 155.24 crore shares against 4.90 crore reserved. Non-institutional investors, the wealthy individuals, went 13.36 times, per Moneycontrol’s 3:14 pm snapshot of exchange data.
Retail individual investors, the people this IPO was marketed to, subscribed 2.45 times. Their quota of 8.50 crore shares is the largest slice of the main offer at 31.5 percent, per Univest’s breakdown, yet it drew the weakest response of any major category. The shareholder reservation, open to those who held Reliance Industries shares as of October 14, went 7.08 times, while employees subscribed 2.68 times. Overall, the issue drew 1.10 crore applications, Fortune India reported.
Here is the quiet irony no wire report will spell out. The Jio IPO’s anchor book on October 19 pulled in roughly Rs 2.5 lakh crore of demand, thirty times the Rs 8,110 crore anchor portion, with 212 anchor investors allotted shares at Rs 1,119 apiece. At 1:30 pm on Friday, the entire public book had managed Rs 1.76 lakh crore. A room of invited institutions generated more demand than the whole country managed by lunch. This was always the institutions’ IPO. The 1.10 crore applications just made the crowd bigger, not louder.
What the money is actually for
Strip the records away and the red herring prospectus tells a plainer story. This is a fresh issue of 27 crore shares with no offer for sale, which means every rupee raised stays with the company rather than flowing to selling shareholders. But nearly all of it is already spoken for: Rs 27,500 crore of the proceeds will repay borrowings of Reliance Jio Infocomm, the telecom subsidiary, with the remainder set aside for general corporate purposes, per Upstox’s reading of the RHP.
That is the checkable detail the celebrations skip. For all the talk of a war chest, roughly nine rupees of every ten raised go toward retiring debt, not toward the AI and cloud businesses the valuation is supposed to price in. The price band of Rs 1,065 to Rs 1,119 values the company at about Rs 10.3 lakh crore at the top end, as we noted when the RHP was filed. At that price, investors are not buying the balance sheet. They are buying the story.
The grey market, for now, believes the story. Livemint reported a grey market premium of Rs 245 a share on Friday morning, implying a listing price near Rs 1,354 and gains of about 21.9 percent. Endorsements poured in through the day: Sri Sri Ravi Shankar called Jio a homegrown success story, banker Uday Kotak congratulated the Ambani family, and investor Manish Chokhani praised the company’s contribution to India’s technology landscape, News24 reported.
Two dates left on the calendar
Allotment is expected on October 26, with refunds on October 27 and the listing on the NSE and BSE on October 28, per ipoji.com’s offer timeline. Between now and then, the only number that matters is the one nobody can bid on: the opening price.
Wednesday answered whether the money would show up. Friday answered how much of it, and from whom. The harder question, the one the Rs 245 grey market premium is really betting on, is what Jio Platforms has to become by 2030 to justify a Rs 10.3 lakh crore price tag. The bidding is over. The arguing starts Monday.