Stay informed with free updates
Simply sign up to the Indian business & finance myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.
India is heading for a third record-breaking year of initial public offerings, with a pipeline of multibillion-dollar listings led by the flotation of Reliance Jio Infocomm, which could be the country’s largest ever.
The amount raised by Indian IPOs is poised to surpass last year’s record of just over $20bn, multiple bankers in Mumbai told the FT. The dealmaking comes despite Indian equities’ underperformance against other emerging markets and investor concerns about punishing 50 per cent US tariffs and high stock valuations.
“It’s going to be the best IPO year,” said Jayasankar Venkataraman, managing director of Kotak Investment Bank, a top arranger of Indian listings last year, which expects $27bn of market debuts this year, with a third coming from floats above $1bn in size.
Goldman Sachs is expecting Indian IPO volumes to exceed $25bn this year as middle-class households continue to funnel their savings into equities. Steady flows from retail investors have repeatedly pushed Indian stocks to record highs, with the Nifty 50 index gaining nearly 80 per cent in the past five years.
This has created favourable conditions for companies seeking high valuations, despite foreign outflows. Local funds accounted for 60 per cent of IPO anchor books last year, up from 40 per cent in 2024, according to Kotak, which expects the share to rise this year.
“This is being driven by genuine demand rather than short-term momentum,” said Sunil Khaitan, head of Goldman’s India financing group. “We have a strong pipeline of large transactions heading into 2026.”
The centrepiece is Jio, India’s largest telecoms operator and one of the three main businesses of Reliance Industries, the conglomerate controlled by Asia’s richest man Mukesh Ambani.
In August, Ambani announced Reliance’s intention to list Jio in the first half of 2026. The conglomerate with interests across oil, retail and media is working with bankers on the details of the transaction, according to people familiar with the matter.
Jio’s IPO is expected to raise as much as $4bn for a 2.5 per cent stake, according to people aware of the plans, which would make it the largest in Indian history. The previous record was set in 2024 by Hyundai’s local unit, which raised $3.3bn. Reliance did not respond to a request for comment.
Beyond Jio, expected large offerings include the National Stock Exchange, Walmart-backed digital payments leader PhonePe, and the Indian arms of Carlsberg and Coca-Cola. Quick-commerce app Zepto said this month it was preparing a roughly $1.2bn flotation.
Foreign investors largely sat out last year’s IPO wave, pulling $19bn from Indian markets as they turned to US assets and AI-linked stocks, a sector in which India is largely absent.
Valuations remain a problem for global fund managers, with Indian equities trading above 23 times forward earnings, according to the MSCI India index, making them among the most expensive in Asia.
There are also concerns about trade, with New Delhi still lacking a bilateral deal with Washington and the rupee at an all-time low, even as India’s economy continues to grow at the fastest pace among major countries.
After a year of underperformance, Indian bankers argued local stocks were now relatively cheap.
“India’s valuation premium relative to the MSCI Emerging Markets index is now at its lowest level in some time,” said Goldman’s Khaitan. “That recalibration creates the conditions for foreign institutional investors to return to India in 2026 in a very meaningful way.”
Still, they are unlikely to “come back in a hurry”, said Kunal Vora, head of Indian equity research at BNP Paribas. “The valuations in India still are not very comfortable. If there’s global momentum elsewhere . . . India is not the most attractive market.”
Abhay Agarwal, founder of Mumbai-based fund manager Piper Serica, said meaningful price discovery often only began once lock-in periods for founders and anchor investors started to expire a month after IPOs.
“As soon as the lock-ins get over, there is a severe price correction,” he said. “Investors like us who are in no hurry are going to wait.”
A November report by Macquarie Capital observed that 40 per cent of Indian stocks delivered negative returns one month after listing and cautioned that corporate insiders were “cashing in” rather than reinvesting proceeds.
Some bankers argued post-IPO underperformance was largely isolated to lower-tier floats. Debuts above $330mn achieved an average listing gain of about 19 per cent last year, compared with 9 per cent for smaller issues, according to Kotak.
