A Dhan Dhana Dhan IPO for Jio

**Akshara** (0:04)
In today's episode, we'll break down two important stories. First, we'll talk about a Dhan Dhana Dhan IPO for Jio, and then we'll talk about whether India is ready for the super El Nino. Welcome back to The Daily Brief by Zeerudha, where we cut through the noise to help you understand what's actually happening in the most important stories from business and markets. I'm your host Akshara, and today is Tuesday, 23rd June. Before we start the show, we'd like to tell you about our new episode on subtext. So the role of the dollar and its influence on global trade is a complicated story that has constantly changed over time. On Markets by Zeerudha, we got Brad Setzer to tell us how. Most of Twitter knows Brad is one of the sharpest voices on all things balance of payments, and he's a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He also served at the US Treasury and the National Economic Council. So we recorded this conversation while the Iran War was unfolding, and oil markets were watching the Strait of Hormuz, and not long after Trump and Xi had met in Beijing to negotiate a trade deal. We used the moment to ask him about the things he thinks about most. Why the dollar is really strong, what an AI bust would do to it, how the manufacturing surpluses of China, Korea and Taiwan quietly finance the American deficit, and what China would have to do to rebalance. The links to the podcast are in the description below. Coming to the first story.
If there was one thing that the Indian capital markets were waiting for with bated breath, it's the obviously bumper listing of Jio. They just filed their IPO papers with a fresh issue, meaning Jio is raising money for itself and not existing shareholders selling out. As we covered just last week, NSE filed their papers too. And combined, the estimate issue sizes of both companies put together could be around Rs 65,000 crore.
Now, these numbers wouldn't have made sense a decade ago. And it's impressive that our capital markets have become deep enough to absorb issue sizes like this. So Jio is essentially the reason why you're watching us today on YouTube, reading us on Substack, or listening to us on an audio platform. It's the reason why a lot of companies, occupations and internet economies exist today, not only in India, but outside it. The momentous decision by Reliance to enter the market in 2016, with virtually free data and talk time, opened the floodgates for the Indian digital economy. And you probably know the rest of the story. So before Jio, 1GB of data cost around 225 rupees. But today, it costs about 10 rupees. UPI, which was launched the same year as Jio, went from near zero processing to processing 228 billion transactions in 2025
India went from 3 crore DMAT accounts to over 20 crore. The number of online shoppers has tripled. And data consumption per person went from less than 02GB a month to over 42GB. Now, whenever we used to look at the results for behemoth like Reliance, it was hard to see what was happening at an individual business level. Each division of the conglomerate is its own labyrinth. But this listing means we'll get a proper view into India's biggest telecom company for the first time. And the same will be true for Reliance Retail when it eventually goes public. With that, let's dive into the prospectus of India's largest telecom player. In FY26, Jio platforms earned Rs.1.46 lakh crore in revenue. And this is mostly from one thing, mobile broadband subscriptions. Customers buy prepaid or postpaid plans. Those plans give them data and Jio charges for them. That's the core of the business. As of March 2026, Jio serves about 52 crore mobile customers or around 40% of the Indian mobile market. And in comparison, Airtel has about 37 crore mobile subscribers and Vodafone Idea has about 19 crore.
The network carries about 60% of all wireless data traffic in India, and the average data consumption per Jio customer is 42 GB per month. Now, India has about 126 crore total mobile subscribers today. And of these, about 26 crore are still on 2G networks. They're mostly customers of Vodafone Idea and BSNL, who have not yet upgraded their phones to 4G. Now, these are Jio's most obvious growth pool. Every one of those customers who buys a 4G phone is a potential Jio subscriber. Now, the key metric for any telecom is average revenue per user or ARPU, which means how much the company earns per customer per month. Jio's ARPU is Rs 214 per month, and for comparison, Airtel's is Rs 257