India's biggest ever share offer

**Bisi Adebayo** (0:01)
Could India's biggest ever IPO become a test of global investor confidence? It's World Business Express from the BBC World Service. I am Bisi Adibayo. A new report suggests Brexit has left the UK economy smaller than it otherwise would have been, and why Hague is getting a surprise welcome in America during the World Cup.
So what could become India's biggest ever stock market listing is moving a step closer. Reliance Jio, the telecoms and digital services giant controlled by billionaire Mukesh Ambani, is preparing for an initial public offering that could raise as much as $4 billion, while the company is also ramping up its artificial intelligence ambitions, announcing plans to deploy NVIDIA's latest AI chips. I've been speaking to our India correspondent, Aruna De Mukherjee.

**Aruna De Mukherjee** (0:56)
Well this is big, just the sheer scale of the intended IPO and just because of the company that we're talking about. So this could be India's biggest stock offering. Coming from one of Asia's richest men, Mukesh Ambani, he owns Reliance Industries and this is the company's telecom arm, Jio Platforms. It could fetch as much as $4 billion according to some estimates. So it is being seen as one of its biggest offerings in the country. This is a company that stormed India's telecom market in the year 2016, offering users the cheapest mobile data network in the world. In just 10 years, despite being a late entrant to the telecom market, it dominates India's telecom space with well over 500 million subscribers.
Now betting big on Reliance Jio in recent years, we've seen the company having investments worth billions coming in from big tech players like Meta, Google, Reliance Jio signed deals with Elon Musk's SpaceX to bring the Starlink Internet service to India. So this just puts into perspective why this is such a big headline here in the country.

**Bisi Adebayo** (1:58)
The company is also saying it's deploying NVIDIA's latest AI chips. So how important is the AI story to this potentially record-breaking IPO?

**Aruna De Mukherjee** (2:08)
Well, it is very important in the general AI macro space because you see what's happened is one of the major shortcomings for India has been AI infrastructure. It's really lagged behind. And compared to countries like the US or China, India is far behind. Which is why coming late to the race, India has been desperately trying to catch up. That's why you've seen billions in investments coming in to create data centers which are being poured into India. And obviously the potential is the fact that India's 1.4 billion strong population, which is where the potential is seen by several companies. This announcement by Reliance is in line with that ambition. They have described this as building India's sovereign artificial intelligence backbone in the city of Jamnagar in the western state of Gujarat. According to Reliance, this will place the company among the largest AI infrastructure platforms being built anywhere in the world. So this is an initiative that aims to build infrastructure, a platform and services business catering to consumers, enterprises and governments, as they described it themselves. And in the past, it's a company that has partnered with the likes of Google, Meta and, as you said, NVIDIA, as part of that initiative. So this is a very, very significant step.

**Bisi Adebayo** (3:15)
Aruna De Mukherjee there. Now, let's talk about a new report which suggests the British economy is around 6% smaller than it would have been if it had remained in the European Union. Researchers examined the decisions, expectations and financial performance of thousands of British companies since the 2016 Brexit referendum. Here is our business correspondent, Mark Ashdown.

**Mark Ashdown** (3:37)
Researchers here used the Internal Bank of England data. It's important to say this is not the bank itself. These are researchers. They looked at decisions, views, financial results of thousands of British companies, and they used that data to extrapolate, to work out how the UK would have grown potentially if it had stayed within the EU. Now, they found about half of this economic hit, their report came from the sheer surprise really at the outcome of the referendum. A lot of people weren't expecting it. That led to lots of uncertainty which lasted many, many years. The rest, they say, came from the rising trade barriers, if you like, after the UK eventually left the single market and the customs union in 2021 All this, of course, comes ahead of the 10th anniversary of the referendum. I think the debate will no doubt go on about how different sectors have been affected. But this 6% figure really is just the latest estimation of the impact of Brexit on the UK economy.