Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s son Akash leads Jio IPO that drew $77 billion

Akash Ambani, the eldest son of Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani, has become the public face of Jio Platforms as the telecom and digital arm of Reliance Industries Ltd. prepares to start trading on Wednesday, Oct. 28, after a $3.2 billion initial public offering that drew more than $77 billion in bids, the most for any share sale in India's history.

Akash, who turned 35 last week, is managing director of Jio Platforms. His father still chairs the company, while Akash has been chairman of its telecom unit, Reliance Jio Infocomm, since 2022, a move widely read as part of the family's succession planning.

He led the pitch at the company's IPO event earlier this month, taking investors through Jio's 533 million customers and its profit margins. His twin sister, Isha, shared the stage. Their father did not attend. "I'm here as a representative of the entire company," Akash said.

An executive who worked on the offering said Akash weighs in on some of the bigger decisions but stays out of day-to-day management, and handles relationships with marquee investors such as Meta Platforms Inc., which owns nearly 10% of Jio. "He is the one who makes the calls to Mark Zuckerberg," the executive said. Mukesh Ambani is closer to many of the sovereign wealth funds that have backed the group.

India's most subscribed IPO

The shares were offered at ₹1,065 to ₹1,119 each, a range that values Jio at up to $108.3 billion. It is Reliance's first IPO in two decades, and comes seven years after Mukesh Ambani first promised in 2019 to list the business within five years.

Demand was heavy from the start. Anchor investors, including the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, BlackRock and Fidelity, bid more than $25 billion for the $853 million of stock set aside for them. The public offer was fully subscribed within two hours of opening on Oct. 21. By the time it closed on Friday, the issue had been subscribed 22.2 times overall, with the retail portion covered about twice, the employee quota 2.5 times and the portion reserved for existing Reliance shareholders 5.7 times.

Meta, Google and other global investors put ₹1.52 trillion ($20.5 billion at the time) into Jio Platforms in 2020, when Reliance sold stakes in the business to cut its debt.

More than a telecom company

Jio earned about $3.2 billion in profit on revenue of $15.45 billion in the year to March. Telecom services still bring in nearly 90% of the revenue and about 94% of the profit. The business launched in 2016 by giving away voice calls and data, which forced rivals into a price war, and its more than 500 million users make it the second-largest operator in any single country after China Mobile.

The company wants investors to see it differently. Its prospectus opens with the line "We are a technology platform," and Akash has said that "Jio is not just a telco." He plans to offer AI-powered call summaries and transcription in 12 Indian languages. "We're the only play in town that can do that," he said. "What we have is an innate understanding of our Jio customers."

A third generation

The rush of small investors recalls the approach of Akash's grandfather, Dhirubhai Ambani, who founded Reliance and built a mass following among retail shareholders in the 1980s by holding annual meetings in open grounds in Mumbai. He died in 2002. A garlanded portrait of Dhirubhai stood on an easel at this month's IPO event, beside photographs of those early shareholder meetings.

Reliance's Mumbai-listed shares have risen about 330-fold since 1990, giving the group a market value of about $172 billion. Mukesh Ambani has been preparing his three children to run it for years. Isha oversees the retail business, and his younger son, Anant, the new-energy unit.

Akash studied economics at Brown University in the U.S. and helps run Mumbai Indians, the family's Indian Premier League cricket franchise. He married Shloka Mehta in 2019, and the couple have two children.

Wednesday's debut will show whether investors value Jio as the technology platform Akash describes or as the telecom operator that still earns almost all of its profit. Billionaires.Africa covered the offering when it was first priced earlier this month.