A tale of 2 IPOs: Jio Platforms' unified vision & Tata Sons' divided house

The Jio Platforms listing is about unified vision and choice; Tata Sons' possible IPO faces a divided house

Reliance Jio initial public offering (IPO) has come at a time when another conglomerate is caught in a corporate battle over the issue of listing. While the Jio Platforms IPO has added to the festival’s celebratory mood in the Mukesh Ambani-led company, a possible listing of Tata Sons has triggered a bitter dispute within the steel-to-semiconductor group.  

Jio, launched 10 years ago (on September 5, 2016), is visualising a new digital future as its IPO, India’s biggest at around $3.2 billion, opens for subscription from October 21 to 23. Meanwhile, Tata Sons, over a century old, is facing resistance from its largest shareholder, Tata Trusts, over the question of listing. 

Jio Platforms Managing Director Akash Ambani has described it as the biggest moment for the company, saying that it would mark the next growth phase. Tata Trusts Chairman Noel Tata, on the other hand, has maintained that listing Tata Sons would harm the group’s legacy and adversely impact its mission of philanthropy. Many analysts and company executives, however, have argued that Tata Trusts would be able to continue with philanthropy with the same intensity even if Tata Sons is listed.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had last month rejected Tata Sons’ application to deregister as a core investment company (CIC), indicating that it must be listed because of its upper-layer non-banking financial company (NBFC) status. This follows a 2022 norm of the central bank that all upper-layer NBFCs, which included Tata Sons, must be listed within three years. Tata Sons had cleared its debt and applied for deregistration as a CIC in March 2024. In September 2026, the RBI rejected the application. 

Noel Tata, however, said the RBI had not specifically asked Tata Sons to list and opposed the proposal at the Tata Sons’ board meeting on September 17 as a nominee director. He later submitted a restructuring plan to avoid the holding company’s stock market listing.  

Even as Tata Trusts, which is Tata Sons’ largest shareholder with a 66 per cent stake, opposes the listing, its second-largest shareholder, Shapoorji Pallonji Group, with 18 per cent holding, favours it. After the RBI rejected its deregistration application, the Tata Sons board endorsed the proposal to list the company last month. It has to go for the shareholders’ approval next.     

Choice and mandate    

The two situations are different because the largest shareholders — Reliance Industries (RIL) in the case of Jio and Tata Trusts in Tata Sons’ case — see the future of the companies differently, said Shriram Subramanian, founder and managing director, InGovern Research Services, a proxy advisory and corporate governance research firm. “'What is common is the need for a liquidity situation for the minority shareholders in both companies,” he said. Also, while Jio is voluntarily going for an IPO, Tata Sons is being forced into it due to a regulatory requirement, he added. 

Amit Tandon, founder and managing director of proxy advisory firm Institutional Investor Advisory Services, is also of the view that the difference in the two scenarios is that of choice. “Reliance chose to list Jio on its own timing and terms, which is why it feels like a celebration. Tata Sons is being pushed toward listing by the RBI’s upper-layer NBFC rules, against the wishes of Tata Trusts, so it feels like losing control rather than unlocking value,” he explained. 

Also, there was a unified family vision behind the Jio IPO, unlike in the case of Tatas, pointed out Kavil Ramachandran, professor of entrepreneurship at the Indian School of Business (ISB). “Jio has been building a brand with a mega vision to integrate and bring an all-inclusive digital transformation of India with immense strategic possibilities,” he said. “Like the dream Dhirubhai (Ambani) had sold during the first Reliance IPO, Jio is also seeking to fulfill a dream.” That’s not the case with the proposal to list Tata Sons, he added. 

On whether listing Tata Sons might affect Tata Trusts as a charitable organisation, Ramachandran said there might not be significant implications for operational flexibility or philanthropy “since the influence of stock market or stock market activism is very minimal in India’’. 

As for Jio, it’s all about the next chapter of growth.

 The Jio story  

 It was in 2019 at RIL’s 42nd annual general meeting that Chairman and Managing Director Mukesh Ambani announced that both Reliance Jio and Reliance Retail would move towards stock market listing within five years. Jio was barely three then and had already become a disruptor in the telecom sector. The pandemic and geopolitical tensions have delayed its targeted listing by two years, and there is no word on when Reliance Retail will see a stock market launch. 

While announcing the Jio IPO details at a press conference recently, Akash Ambani shared the contours of the company’s growth path. With over 530 million customers and 60 per cent of India’s data traffic, the top telco has identified four pillars of expansion: Mobile connectivity, home broadband, enterprise digital services, and international technology monetisation. The focus is clearly on scale. 

Asked about likely tariff hikes, he stressed that Jio’s focus would remain on value-added services rather than on price-per-gigabyte increases. “We always have the ability to take prices up, but what we want to do is to really deliver more services to our customers so that they’re very happy,’’ he said. Right from the start, Jio disrupted the telecom market with its bet on affordability, at the cost of keeping the monthly average revenue per user (Arpu), and therefore customer tariffs, among the lowest in the world. 

Jio’s red herring prospectus lists the mobile broadband Arpu for the 2025-26 financial year (FY26) at ₹199.50, up from ₹106 in FY19. It projects the mobile broadband Arpu to touch ₹326.40 in FY31. In the first quarter of FY27, Jio recorded an overall monthly Arpu of ₹215 against ₹264 for Bharti Airtel, which has the second-largest user base in India with over 491 million wireless subscribers. Bharti Group Chairman Sunil Bharti Mittal has maintained that a healthy Arpu would keep the sector healthy. 

Speaking on the impact of the Jio listing, Prashant Singhal, telecommunications leader at EY India, and clients and industries leader for EY Africa-India region, pointed out that now two Indian telcos would feature among the top 10 global telcos by market cap. “In terms of subscribers, Indian telcos were already among the top five globally. It positions Indian telcos prominently in the global telecom map,’’ Singhal said. With three listed players (Jio, Bharti Airtel, and Vodafone Idea), the expectation is that there would be greater access to capital for the next phase of growth, he added. 

According to Singhal, the Jio listing would reaffirm that India is the ideal place to list currently. It’s also likely to open up global merger and acquisition (M&A) activity for Indian telecom companies, helping them consolidate across geographies, he said. Ramachandran believes Jio’s listing would increase RIL’s influence on the corporate world even further.

As for Tata Sons’ listing, clarity has still 

to emerge.