Global Investors Flood Jio Platforms IPO as Anchor Bids Soar Past $26 Billion

 

Jio Platforms has attracted extraordinary interest from global investors as it prepares for its initial public offering. Major institutions such as Capital Group, GIC, and BlackRock have submitted bids for the company’s anchor allocation, a portion of the offering reserved for large investors before shares become available to the public. According to a source familiar with the process, the demand for this segment exceeded expectations by a wide margin, with total bids reaching roughly 2.5 trillion rupees, or about $26.3 billion. This is more than thirty times the size of the anchor book, which amounts to 81.1 billion rupees.

The company, backed by Meta and Google, intends to raise as much as 302 billion rupees—approximately $3.2 billion—through what will be India’s largest IPO in rupee terms. In a statement released Monday, Jio Platforms confirmed that it had allocated 72.47 million shares to anchor investors at 1,119 rupees per share, the top end of its pricing range.

The anchor portion of an IPO is designed to bring in major institutional investors ahead of the public offering, helping establish confidence and stability before retail bidding begins. Alongside the prominent global firms that placed bids, several other major institutions have secured allocations, including India’s Life Insurance Corporation, Fidelity Investments, JPMorgan Asset Management, and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.

Jio Platforms, owned by Reliance Industries, will open its public offering from Wednesday through Friday. The company has increasingly positioned itself as a technology‑driven enterprise rather than a traditional telecommunications utility, reflecting its expansion into digital services. Based on the IPO pricing, Jio Platforms is valued at around $108 billion, a figure lower than the valuations of more than $130 billion that circulated in earlier discussions a year prior.