Jio Platforms filed for an IPO. India's largest wireless operator finally decided to let retail traders touch it.
The company provides digital services to over 400 million subscribers. That's 400 million people who will now get to watch their countrymen lose money on the stock instead of just losing money on the service.
Jio launched in 2016 offering free data. Free. The business model was giving away the product and hoping someone would pay later. Worked about as well as you'd expect until they started charging and everyone kept using it anyway because switching carriers requires paperwork and humans would rather bleed from their eyes.
The IPO filing comes after parent company Reliance raised billions from investors like Facebook and Google in 2020. Those companies looked at Jio's subscriber base and saw dollar signs. Retail traders will look at the IPO and see dollar signs too. One of these groups will be right.
Mukesh Ambani owns Reliance. He's worth over $90 billion. The IPO will not make him richer in any meaningful way. A billion here or there stops mattering after the first sixty billion. But it will create liquidity for early investors and a fresh batch of bagholder positions for people who think they understand Indian telecom because they read three paragraphs on CNBC.
The filing includes zero information about price or timing. Just the announcement that it exists. The financial media covered it anyway because telecom IPO and India and large numbers make good headlines even when there's nothing to report.
Chart nerds will draw lines on this stock the day it trades. Support levels and resistance and moving averages. They will argue about whether the opening candle invalidates the pre-market gap or confirms institutional accumulation. The stock will go up or down based on whether more people want to buy it than sell it, rendering every technical indicator as useful as a sundial in a cave.
Your neighbor will ask if you're getting in on the Jio IPO. Tell him you're waiting for the company to discover profitability first.
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