Jio, NSE File for $7bn+ in Dual Landmark IPOs
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- Jio Platforms filed for an IPO expected to raise ~$4bn at a $120-160bn valuation, with 525 million subscribers anchoring India's leap from roughly 200 million internet users a decade ago to nearly a billion today.
- National Stock Exchange (NSE) filed draft papers days later, offering 6% equity for $3.3bn at a $57bn valuation — making it the world's largest derivatives exchange and the backbone of India's $4.85tn stock market, now the fourth-largest globally.
- Retail investing surged in parallel: online trading accounts in India jumped from ~30 million to over 200 million during the pandemic, fuelled by cheap Jio mobile data and rising smartphone use — the boom the NSE listing directly captures.
- Jio is repositioning beyond telecom into AI and digital infrastructure through partnerships with Nvidia and Meta to build data centres and Indian-language large language models, according to the article.
- India's broader market has been among the world's worst performers over the past year as foreign investors pulled billions toward the US and AI-driven Asian markets, with a crashing currency compounding the appeal problem.
- UPI (United Payments Interface) processed 228 billion transactions in 2025, up from near zero when it launched the same year as Jio in 2016 — illustrating how mobile data reshaped how Indians spend, invest, and transact.
Why it matters: Foreign investors have already pulled billions from Indian equities over the past year amid weak returns and a falling rupee, and retail investors got burned by underperforming IPOs from Paytm and LIC. If Jio's $120-160bn valuation and NSE's $57bn price tag leave room for shareholder upside, the twin listings pull global capital back into India's $4.85tn market; if not, they deepen the rout.
