India’s largest stock exchange and its biggest telecoms operator are both going public by the end of this year in what experts say could be landmark listings for the country’s capital markets. Jio Platforms, the digital arm of billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries, and the National Stock Exchange (NSE) – the world’s largest derivatives exchange and among the top three equity exchanges by trading volume – filed draft papers for their initial public offerings just days apart last month.
Jio is expected to mop up around $4bn (£3.02bn) at an estimated valuation of $120-160bn, while NSE’s issue will reportedly offer 6% equity for $3.3bn, valuing the bourse at $57bn. Beyond the unprecedented scale, investors are closely watching because the listings represent sweeping changes in how Indians have come to live, consume, invest and transact over the past decade, according to Yatin Singh, CEO of Investment Banking at Emkay Global.
“India's biggest stock exchange and telecom operator are set for landmark IPOs, raising billions and reflecting a decade of digital transformation.”
“These are unique businesses which don’t get built often,” Singh told the BBC. “NSE is a direct proxy of the ‘financialisation’ of Indian household savings into mutual funds and stocks, while Jio is the story of a company that single handedly ushered in a digital revolution, becoming a driving factor for several new-age Indian businesses. Their listings could be seminal for the Indian markets in the way the marquee offerings of software companies became many decades ago.”
Jio’s belated entry into India’s crowded telecom market in 2016 consolidated a highly fragmented industry of 17 operators and turned it into a virtual duopoly, as the Ambanis sparked a fierce pricing war by offering virtually free data to hundreds of millions of new users. Barely 200 million Indians used the internet a decade ago; that number is now inching closer to a billion, with Jio alone amassing 525 million subscribers who use its data to make payments, watch web shows and shop online. Indians are now the largest consumers of mobile data globally, surpassing even developed markets such as the US and China, driven largely by Jio’s cheap tariffs that democratised smartphone use.
The way the country spends money and time has changed dramatically as a result of this digitisation. India’s United Payments Interface, launched in the same year as Jio, went from processing near zero digital payments to 228 billion transactions in 2025, according to brokerage Zerodha. Paid subscribers to OTT platforms have also jumped. As these two giants prepare to list, their IPOs could mark a turning point for India’s capital markets, offering a direct bet on the financialisation of a nation that has become glued to its phones.