By Aditya Kalra
NEW DELHI, Oct 23 (Reuters) - Bids for billionaire Mukesh Ambani's first IPO in 20 years topped $77 billion on Friday, making Jio Platforms India's most subscribed stock offering as it surpassed the 2008 issue of Reliance Power, part of his brother Anil's group.
The IPO of Ambani's telecoms and digital business is seen as a test of investor appetite for large listings at a time when AI-linked stocks are facing increased scrutiny.
Jio Platforms, whose mobile network serves more than 500
million users in India, is launching its initial public offering during the Hindu festive season which is viewed as lucky.
The IPO values Jio Platforms at up to $108.3 billion, potentially making it one of India's biggest companies by market capitalisation when trading starts on Wednesday.
Public subscriptions for the IPO exceeded 22 times the shares on offer, driven by strong demand from institutional and retail investors, employees and shareholders. If bids were largely placed near the 1,119-rupee ($11.79) top of the price band, demand will have exceeded $51.5 billion.
That is on top of anchor investors like Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, BlackRock and Fidelity who placed total bids of $25.6 billion for the $854 million worth of shares earmarked for them.
LONG-TERM WEALTH GENERATOR
The Jio Platforms IPO has received more than 13.8 million applications, the most ever in India, a Reliance official told Reuters. Chinese memory chip giant CXMT's $8.6 billion IPO, Asia's biggest this year, attracted around 9.4 million accounts.
"This is a Reliance IPO after a long time, which is triggering a lot of exuberance and euphoria for the stock," said Kranthi Bathini, equity strategist at WealthMills Securities.
Jio Platforms, led by Ambani's eldest son, Akash Ambani, counts Meta Platforms and Alphabet's Google among its longest-standing investors.
Its offering was fully subscribed within two hours of opening on Wednesday, a contrast with most Indian IPOs, where books typically build gradually and institutional investors often wait until the final hours to place bids.
Jio Platforms is part of Reliance Industries, a company often seen by Indian investors as a long-term wealth generator as its shares have returned some 900% since 2006, outperforming the benchmark Nifty index's 685% return, LSEG data shows.
BIG INVESTOR INTEREST
Jio Platforms' telecoms business, launched in 2016, disrupted the market by offering free voice and data, hitting rivals Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea. On the basis of customers in a single country it is now second only to China Mobile.
At Friday's close, the institutional portion of the IPO was subscribed 70.55 times, underscoring strong demand from large investors. The retail tranche was covered 2.7 times, while bids from employees and existing Reliance shareholders reached 2.93 and 7.6 times the shares on offer, respectively, data showed.
Reliance was founded by Dhirubhai Ambani, Akash Ambani's grandfather, who cultivated a vast retail investor base through mass shareholder gatherings in Mumbai in the 1980s.
The conglomerate's website says its 1977 listing helped popularise investing, "ushering the equity cult" into India.
(Reporting by Aditya Kalra; Editing by Shri Navaratnam and William Mallard)
