From ₹10 a share to ₹5,800cr: The quiet genius of Nahata’s Jio bet

Fourteen years ago, a telecom entrepreneur won a spectrum auction and held on. What he’s sitting on today may be one of the greatest returns in Indian corporate history.

When Jio Platforms filed its Draft Red Herring Prospectus with SEBI earlier this month, the filing made headlines for the obvious reasons, India’s potentially largest-ever IPO, Mukesh Ambani’s digital empire going public, and global giants like Meta and Google locked out of a float they can’t participate in. But buried in the DRHP’s shareholder disclosures was a quieter, more extraordinary story: the 11,983 percent return accruing to one of India’s most understated telecom veterans.

Mahendra Nahata, Founder and Managing Director of HFCL, acquired his stake in Jio Platforms in July 2020 at ₹10 per share. Motilal Oswal now values Jio Platforms at ₹10.7 lakh crore. Nahata’s 0.54 percent holding, which cost his family ₹47.87 crore in total, is worth approximately ₹5,800 crore. That is a 121-fold return in under six years.

To put that in perspective: on the same day the Nahata family received their shares at ₹10 each, Reliance was allotting its first tranche to Meta at ₹488.34 per share. Most of the thirteen global institutional investors who collectively poured ₹1,52,056 crore into Jio, Meta, Google, KKR, Saudi Arabia’s PIF, Vista Equity Partners, Mubadala, General Atlantic, ADIA, and TPG, paid ₹549.31 per share. Nahata’s entry price was a fraction of what the world’s most sophisticated investors paid on the very same day.

The spectrum day that changed everything
The origin story of this windfall reaches back to June 11, 2010, a day that Nahata could scarcely have imagined would set the terms for a multi-thousand-crore payday a decade and a half later.

On that day, Infotel Broadband Services won pan-India broadband wireless spectrum at auction for ₹12,872 crore. Infotel was a relatively small telecom company with connections to the Nahata family. Within hours of the auction result, Reliance Industries had acquired a 95 percent stake in Infotel for ₹4,800 crore, and crucially, percent. Reliance then paid for the spectrum Infotel had won.

That 5 percent stake in what would eventually become Reliance Jio Infocomm, renamed in 2013 and restructured into Jio Platforms in 2019, is the foundation on which today’s fortune rests. Nahata did not need to write another cheque. The value compounded around him as Ambani built the infrastructure that rewired India’s digital economy.

The 2020 conversion
By July 2020, the family’s stake had been restructured through Compulsorily Convertible Debentures. On July 7 of that year, the Nahata family, Mahendra Nahata, son Anant Nahata and daughter Priyanka Sanghi, converted those debentures into 37.04 million equity shares at ₹10 each, investing ₹37.04 crore. Reliance simultaneously allotted a further 10.83 million shares worth ₹10.83 crore, bringing the family’s combined holding to 47.87 million shares, or 0.54 percent of Jio Platforms.

The timing and pricing of that conversion are what make the numbers so arresting. At ₹10 per share, the family was effectively being given equity at face value, the par price assigned at incorporation, even as thirteen of the world’s largest technology companies and sovereign wealth funds were paying up to 55 times that per share for their positions on the same day.

A relationship deeper than an investment
Nahata’s connection to Jio is not merely that of a lucky early shareholder. HFCL was one of the key vendors that physically built Jio’s 4G optical fibre cable network, with Nahata describing Jio as “a good paymaster” for turnkey projects. The Ambani-Nahata relationship spans the full arc of modern Indian telecom, from the chaos of the early 1990s market opening, through the spectrum wars of the 2000s, to the 4G revolution of the 2010s, and now to the Jio IPO of 2026.

HFCL, which Nahata founded in 1987 and has led through several cycles of Indian telecom growth, has benefited from Jio’s expansion as a contractor and supplier. But the equity stake adds a different dimension, one in which Nahata participates not just in Jio’s revenues as a vendor but in its total enterprise value as an owner.

No exit, Yet
Like every other Jio shareholder outside Reliance, Nahata is expected not to be selling a single share in the upcoming IPO. The DRHP contains no Offer-for-Sale component; the entire issue is a fresh raise of up to 270 million shares to generate capital for debt repayment and corporate purposes. The ₹5,800 crore valuation is real but unrealized, residing on paper until the stock lists and lock-in periods expire.

That is likely of little concern. With Jio Platforms expected to debut at a market capitalisation of nearly ₹14 lakh crore, and the combined RIL-Jio entity potentially commanding ₹32 lakh crore in market value, there is every reason to believe the post-listing secondary market will provide ample liquidity when the time comes. If Jio lists at the higher end of analyst expectations, the Nahata family’s stake could be worth considerably more than current estimates suggest.

What the numbers actually say
For context on what 11,983 percent looks like in practice: a ₹1 lakh investment at the same terms as Nahata’s 2020 conversion would be worth approximately ₹1.2 crore today. The family’s ₹47.87 crore outlay has, on paper, become ₹5,800 crore. That is a compounded annual growth rate that would make even the most celebrated venture capital funds pause.

What makes the Nahata story distinct from a typical venture windfall is the nature of the original bet, not a startup punt, but a consequence of a spectrum auction in 2010, a relationship with one of India’s most powerful industrialists, and a patience that outlasted multiple market cycles, regulatory upheavals, and the complete restructuring of India’s telecom landscape.

In the history of Indian business, fortunes have been made in many ways. Few, however, have been made quite as quietly, or quite as completely, as Mahendra Nahata’s decade-and-a-half wager on what Jio might one day become.

CT Bureau