D-St plans on Jio's mind, likely tariff hike may boost valuation: Analysts

Reliance Industries’ plans to list unit Jio Platforms, the parent of telecom market leader, Reliance Jio, has set the stage for a 15% industry tariff hike expected later this year, say analysts.

They added that this move could lift the mobile phone operator’s valuation beyond the $133 billion some analysts currently peg it at.

Reliance Industries is planning to list its digital venture Jio Platforms in the first half of 2026, RIL chairman Mukesh Ambani told an annual shareholder meeting last week.

The tariff repair cycle is positive for both Jio and Bharti Airtel, though analysts note Airtel’s stock could see a rerating if Jio lists at a premium. This comes at a time when the two rivals are neck-to-neck in heavy investments across data centres, cloud, and home broadband, as they look to expand beyond pure-play telecom.


“We believe this event increases the likelihood of tariff hikes towards the end of CY25 (we bake in November) and also another one at end-CY26 (we bake in Nov-26),” said equity research firm JP Morgan.

Typically, being the industry leader, Jio has been taking the lead in raising industry tariffs.

“BHARTI has not only delivered the highest conversion of tariff hikes to monetisation and ROIC repair since the beginning of tariff hikes in 2019, it is also investing in new growth areas such as the Homes business, data centres and the cloud,” it noted.

JP Morgan cautioned that the market may have “already priced Jio in line with its peers in Reliance’s sum-of-the-parts valuation…Yet, the probability of higher tariffs into the IPO increases, which could be a catalyst for the RIL stock.”

The initial public offering (IPO), which could be the country’s biggest, will offer exits to some of the company’s 14 global investors at around double their initial commitments made five years ago.

Analysts also pointed out that market regulator Sebi’s new rule to reduce large-cap companies minimum public float from 5% to 2.5% bodes well for Jio listing.

By requiring it to sell fewer shares, it helps Reliance avoid its stock being undervalued due to holding company discount after Jio’s listing, Citi Research noted.

Earlier, Jio—valued at $133 billion—would have needed to sell shares worth at least $6-7 billion totalling 5% of its market cap. That would have been a very large supply for the Indian market to absorb at once.

For Reliance, its new energy bet is coming together at a time when its GenAI ecosystems could emerge as the next-decade of value creation, analysts said.

“Reliance has all the ingredients to become India's most aggressive play on Gen AI, as it replicates the US hyperscaler model to offer power generation capacity to data centers for inferencing and training,” brokerage firm Morgan Stanley said in a report.

NVIDIA’s blackwell chips and power from new energy could help Reliance Intelligence to emerge as a large digital vertical, it said.

But power and computation chips are key bottlenecks in powering AI. A 1 Gigawatt datacentre would need nearly 135k B100 chips and 1.3 Gigawatts round-the-clock power, according to Morgan Stanley.