MUMBAI — Shares in Jio Platforms opened at 1,358 rupees on the Bombay Stock Exchange and the National Stock Exchange on Wednesday, 21.36 per cent above the 1,119 rupees at which the company sold its stock, making Mukesh Ambani's telecoms and digital arm India's second most valuable listed company.

The debut put a public price on a business Reliance Industries built from nothing after it entered mobile telephony a decade ago, and it closed out the largest share sale India has seen. At the opening price Jio Platforms was worth about 12.5 trillion rupees, Business Standard reported, citing exchange data.

That left it behind only its parent, Reliance Industries, at 16.15 trillion rupees, and ahead of Bharti Airtel, its closest competitor in telecoms, at 12.18 trillion rupees.

The offer raised about 30,213 crore rupees. All of it came from 270 million new shares, and neither Reliance nor the minority holders that bought in six years ago, among them Meta and Google, sold any stock. Hyundai Motor India's 27,870 crore rupee sale in 2024 had been the country's biggest, Outlook Money reported.

Bidding opened on October 21 and the offer was covered inside 100 minutes. It finished subscribed 22.19 times, with investors asking for more than 438 crore shares against the 19.75 crore on offer, according to NSE data cited by Business Standard.

Qualified institutional buyers took their portion 70.55 times over. Non-institutional investors bid 14.09 times their share and employees 2.93 times. Retail buyers subscribed 2.72 times, and the slice reserved for Reliance shareholders 7.60 times.

More than 13.8 million people applied, TechCrunch reported. No share sale anywhere had drawn a crore of applications until this one, Business Standard said; the previous high on record, about 97 lakh, belonged to Waaree Energies.

Before the public window opened, Jio Platforms allotted 8,109.85 crore rupees of shares to 212 anchor investors at the top of its 1,065-to-1,119-rupee band. Institutional demand for the offering ran past 2.5 trillion rupees, Business Standard said, more than 30 times the amount available in the anchor book.

Members of the Ambani family attended the listing ceremony at the National Stock Exchange, among them Jio Platforms managing director Akash Ambani and non-executive director Isha Ambani.

"In our first 10 years, we democratised data," Akash Ambani said at the ceremony, according to Moneycontrol. He said the company now wanted to do the same for every technology that could change Indian lives, and set out ambitions in cloud computing, artificial intelligence, connected devices and satellite connectivity.

"10 years ago, the world largely saw India as a market for technology. Today, India is emerging as its creator," he said.

Speaking at the ceremony, he also said he hoped India would one day produce a company counted among the world's great technology firms, TechCrunch reported.

In an email to staff reported by Press Trust of India, Ambani called the listing "a new beginning" and said it "is not our destination". "We did not simply build a telecom network. We helped build the digital backbone of a new India," he wrote. He credited the vision of his father, Reliance chairman Mukesh Ambani.

The debut came on a weak morning for Indian equities. The Sensex and the Nifty 50 each dropped about 1 per cent at one point, with the Sensex down more than 850 points and the Nifty below 22,500, according to Business Standard's market coverage.

Unofficial trading before the listing had pointed to much the same result. A grey market premium of 248 rupees implied a price of 1,367 rupees, Outlook Money reported.

Company figures cited by Business Standard put the subscriber base at 533.3 million in June 2026, carrying close to three-fifths of all data traffic in India. A decade after Reliance entered telecoms, that makes Jio one of the biggest mobile operators anywhere by customer numbers, and it now sells broadband, digital entertainment, cloud and enterprise services as well.

In the year to March 2026 the company made a profit of 30,050 crore rupees on revenue of 1.47 trillion rupees, both up about 15 per cent, TechCrunch reported. When Meta and Google took their stakes in 2020, Jio was valued at up to 4.91 trillion rupees.

Business Standard said the Ambani-controlled parent is left with a majority stake now that the shares are trading.

The company has told investors it will use up to 27,500 crore rupees of the proceeds to repay borrowings at its telecoms subsidiary, Reliance Jio Infocomm, which owed 61,370 crore rupees at the end of June, with the remainder going to general corporate purposes.