Size, valuation and price range

Jio Platforms is seeking up to 302bn rupees (£2.4bn) at a valuation of 10.3tn rupees in the IPO of Mukesh Ambani's Mumbai-based telecoms firm, which is backed by Meta Platforms and Google. The launch comes despite an indian stock market slowdown, with the blue chip Nifty 50 index down more than 12% this year.

• •Reliance Industries said in a stock exchange filing last week that the share price range is 1,065 to 1,119 rupees, with up to 270m new shares on offer.
• •At the top of the range, Jio would be India's fourth-largest company, behind its parent Reliance Industries, Bharti Airtel and HDFC Bank.
• •That value is more than double the 4.9tn-rupee valuation in 2020, when Meta and Google invested.
• •It is still far below initial expectations of more than £110bn when the group posted a draft prospectus in the summer.

Anchor investors and timetable

Before the blockbuster IPO, Jio secured 212 anchor investors on Monday. They include BlackRock, Singapore's sovereign wealth fund, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Fidelity Investments, Schroders, JP Morgan Asset Management, Franklin Templeton, Invesco and Prudential. Shares will be offered to retail investors on Wednesday and the IPO is set to close on Friday.

Company background

Jio was set up about a decade ago as a subsidiary of Reliance Industries and is led by Akash Ambani, Mukesh's oldest son. It offers low-cost broadband to millions of Indians. According to Reliance Industries, its telecoms services launched in September 2016 gained 16 million subscribers in the first month and topped 100 million within 170 days. Jio is credited with making mobile internet more affordable by triggering a price war, and intends to expand further into artificial intelligence, cloud computing and digital infrastructure.

Origin story and employee offer

Isha Ambani, a Jio board director, told investors last week that the idea came from the poor connectivity she and Akash faced when they returned to India on a break from their studies, around 2009-10, and she struggled to submit a college assignment online because the internet was not working.

She said: "Akash firmly believed that the answer and solution to this was creating a digital technology platform company."

Reliance, meanwhile, is encouraging its 400,000-plus employees to buy shares, offering them a discount of 54 rupees a share. Shares float on the stock market from Wednesday.