Mukesh Ambani's promise to investors on Jio IPO to be tested this week

The long-running saga over the listing of Reliance Industries Ltd.’s digital unit comes to a head this week, as investors watch whether its billionaire chairman Mukesh Ambani can walk the talk from last year.

Shareholders of the energy-to-entertainment conglomerate will hear updates from Ambani on Friday at the company’s 49th annual general meeting — a video address that has drawn comparisons to Warren Buffett’s yearly letters to Berkshire Hathaway Inc. investors. It was at last year’s shareholder meeting that Ambani spoke of Reliance looking to list its subsidiary Jio Platforms Ltd. by June 2026, capping a years-long wait for the digital and telecommunications company to go public.

The tycoon has unveiled some of Reliance’s most ambitious initiatives in the past decade from this platform, making it a highly anticipated corporate event in India. Investors hang on to every word Ambani says and analysts pore over his speech for clues on Reliance’s strategy across businesses.

But the Jio-listing pledge has been beset by internal wrangling and discussions in recent months over how to pull off what could be India’s biggest share sale — if it hits its $4 billion target — amid tumultuous market conditions that have been exacerbated by the Iran war. India’s stock market has also been pummeled by record foreign outflows.

With the US-Iran deal this week to end the war and equity markets starting to claw back some of this year’s losses, investors will closely watch if Ambani will help revive India’s IPO market with the Jio listing. The company, which has around 525 million subscribers and reported net income of 300.5 billion rupees ($3.2 billion) for its last fiscal year, is hoping to attain a market valuation of more than $100 billion.

Bankers on standby

Bankers overseeing the Jio IPO have been asked to be ready to file a draft red herring prospectus as early as Thursday — barely 24 hours before Ambani faces Reliance shareholders, according to people familiar with the internal discussions who asked not to be identified sharing private information.

The bankers are on standby to file the papers within 30 minutes of getting a go-ahead from Reliance’s management, the people said, while also cautioning that there could be last-minute changes to the plan.

A Reliance Industries representative did not respond to a request for comment on the IPO timeline.

“A strong IPO valuation and solid post-listing performance could provide a meaningful boost to sentiment around Reliance’s stock, which has lagged peers in recent months,” said Sandip Sabharwal, founder of research house Asksandipsabharwal.com in Mumbai.

Reliance is taking “deliberate steps” to strengthen Jio Platforms’s governance, Ambani wrote in the company’s annual report that was released at the end of May, but shed no light on the IPO preparations or timing.

Reliance shares have slipped 15% this year, making the stock one of the biggest laggards in the benchmark S&P BSE Sensex. The underperformance has also shaved $19 billion off Ambani’s net worth, unseated him as Asia’s richest and pushed his rank down to No. 3 in the region, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Jio’s listing, the first public offering by a major Reliance unit in nearly two decades, would be a landmark event for India’s capital markets that were battered in recent weeks. The plan got a major boost in March, when the government approved changes to listing requirements to facilitate the biggest deals.

Jio also has a star-studded roster of global investors, including Meta Platforms Inc., Alphabet Inc., Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, Mubadala Investment Co., Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Silver Lake Management, KKR & Co., Vista Equity Partners and General Atlantic.

Besides the state of play on Jio’s IPO, investors will be also looking for cues on the listing runway for Reliance Retail Ltd. — India’s largest brick-and-mortar retailer.

Ambani will also detail AI-enabled technology investments, including data centers and tech ventures with international partners as well as the progress on Reliance’s green energy gigafactories, the people said.

Meta announced a partnership this month with Reliance to build its first AI data center in India in Jamnagar, where the conglomerate also runs the world’s largest oil refinery complex.

Ambani said in February that Reliance is planning to invest as much as 10 trillion rupees ($106 billion) over seven years into artificial intelligence-related infrastructure, joining the global rush into technology’s fastest-growing arena. His compatriot and richest Asian, Gautam Adani, also plans to invest $100 billion in AI-ready data centers.