Reliance Jio to capture 48% market share by FY25

New Delhi: Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Jio is likely to capture 48 per cent of Indian mobile subscriber market share by 2025 with over half a billion users, Bernstein said in a report on Wednesday.

"At our last model update in December, we proclaimed Reliance Jio the new king of Indian telecommunications. Since then, we have seen a multitude of international investors reach the same conclusion," the analyst said in the report.

Facebook kicked-off the party, investing Rs 43,573.62 crore to secure 9.99 per cent stake. This was closely followed by a further Rs 60,753.33 crore in investment spread across eight different private equity investors. All together Reliance Industries has monetised 22.38 per cent of Jio Platforms and raised Rs 1.04 lakh crore in the process.

"While we expect strategic cooperation between Facebook and other parts of the Reliance Group, we believe most of the other investments are passive. Reliance gets access to much needed capital to assist in paying down debt, and these investors get early access to the leading telco platform in India," it said.

Bernstein expects an initial public offer (IPO) of Jio sometime over the next few years as its market share approaches 50 per cent. "By then ARPUs (average revenue per user) will have improved and we expect service revenue will double over the next three years."

It projected Jio's mobile subscriber base to cross 500 million mark in FY23, up from 388 million in FY20.