MUMBAI — Jio Platforms' 30,213 crore rupee initial public offering, the largest in India's history, was fully subscribed about 100 minutes after bidding opened on Wednesday, and by the end of the first day investors had bid for roughly three times the shares on offer.

The speed of the response matters because India's biggest share sales have often started slowly. It suggests that demand from large funds for Mukesh Ambani's telecoms and digital business, already visible in a heavily oversubscribed anchor round on Monday, has carried over into the public offer.

By 5 pm, the issue had drawn bids for about 62.36 crore shares against 19.75 crore on offer, a subscription of 3.16 times, according to exchange data cited by the Press Trust of India. The bids were worth about 69,800 crore rupees, the agency reported.

Qualified institutional buyers drove the demand. Their portion, excluding anchor investors, was bid 9.42 times, with applications for 46.15 crore shares against 4.90 crore set aside, PTI said.

Retail investors were slower. Their portion was 0.73 times subscribed, with bids for 6.18 crore shares against 8.50 crore reserved. Non-institutional investors, typically wealthy individuals and corporate bodies, bid for 1.68 times their allocation.

The portion reserved for Jio employees was 1.37 times subscribed, and the quota for existing shareholders of Reliance Industries, Jio's parent, was 1.46 times subscribed, according to PTI.

The book filled steadily through the day. In an earlier update, the news agency ANI reported the offer had been bid 1.27 times, with National Stock Exchange data showing 13.56 lakh applications, and PTI put subscription at 1.43 times as of 12:33 pm. At 3:15 pm, BSE data showed overall subscription at 2.5 times and the institutional portion at 7.46 times, IANS reported.

The price band is 1,065 to 1,119 rupees a share, which values the company at about $108 billion at the top end, PTI reported. Investors must bid for a minimum of 12 shares. Bidding closes on Friday, October 23, allotment is expected to be finalised by October 26, and the shares are due to list on the BSE and the National Stock Exchange on October 28.

PTI said the 100-minute mark made Jio the fastest of India's mega issues to receive bids for every share on offer. Hyundai Motor India, whose 27,870 crore rupee listing in 2024 was the previous record, was only 18 percent subscribed at the end of its first day and did not fill until the third. A PTI tally of past offers noted one exception to the pattern of slow starts: Reliance Power's 11,563 crore rupee issue in 2008 was covered within a minute.

Other large offers followed a similar pattern. The National Stock Exchange's own 22,569 crore rupee issue earlier this year drew bids for 42 percent of its shares on day one, and Life Insurance Corporation of India's 21,000 crore rupee offer in 2022 reached 67 percent, PTI reported. LG Electronics India's 2025 issue was fully subscribed by the close of its first day.

The Jio issue differs from most of those deals because it consists entirely of new shares, up to 27 crore of them. The money goes to the company rather than to existing owners selling down their stakes. Hyundai's listing, by contrast, was entirely an offer for sale by its South Korean parent.

Up to 27,500 crore rupees of the proceeds will be used to repay borrowings at Reliance Jio Infocomm, the wholly owned telecoms subsidiary, with the rest earmarked for capital spending and working capital, according to PTI.

On Monday, Jio Platforms allotted about 8,110 crore rupees of shares at 1,119 rupees each to 212 anchor investors. Bids in that round exceeded 2.5 lakh crore rupees, more than 30 times the shares available, the company said earlier. Anchor investors named in reports included BlackRock, Fidelity Investments, Singapore's GIC, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Norway's Norges Bank Investment Management and the Qatar Investment Authority, along with Indian mutual funds and insurers such as SBI Mutual Fund, HDFC Mutual Fund and Life Insurance Corporation.

Reliance Industries holds 66.4 percent of Jio Platforms before the offer and is expected to own about 64.5 percent afterwards, retaining control, according to research firm CreditSights, as cited by PTI. Minority shareholders including Google and Jaadhu Holdings, an affiliate of Meta, will see their stakes diluted.

Jio Platforms accounted for 37 percent of Reliance's consolidated earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation in the year to March 2026, according to Moody's Ratings, which said the share sale was credit positive for Reliance Industries because the proceeds would cut debt at the telecoms unit, PTI reported. Jio had 533.3 million customers, according to figures cited by its managing director, Akash Ambani.

The offer remains open for two more days, and the final subscription figures for each investor category will be known when bidding closes on Friday evening.