This Week in IPOs — Jio Pops 27%, Zetwerk's Premium Fades by Lunch
Jio Platforms listed today 21%+ above its issue price and kept climbing. Zetwerk opened at a premium five days ago and slipped below issue price by mid-morning.
Two of this month's largest India IPOs have now both finished the step that matters most to anyone who was watching the subscription numbers rather than actually holding shares: the first full day of trading. Last week's roundup covered the books filling — Jio Platforms oversubscribed within hours, Zetwerk struggling to clear even a quarter of its offer. This week, both stocks are live on exchanges, and the gap between a hot book and a durable debut turned out to be its own story.
Jio Platforms opens 21% above its band — and keeps climbing
Jio Platforms listed on the NSE and BSE today, October 28, at ₹1,358 a share — a 21.36% premium to its ₹1,119 issue price, the top of the ₹1,065–1,119 band it had priced at. The stock didn't fade from there the way a typical pop-and-sell debut does. By the afternoon it was trading around ₹1,417–1,419, up roughly 4.5% from its own opening print and about 26–27% above issue price, after ranging between ₹1,357 and ₹1,423.90 during the session. At that level the company's market capitalization works out to roughly ₹13.05 lakh crore — in the neighborhood of $136 billion at prevailing exchange rates, up from the ~$107–108 billion implied by the top of the price band when we profiled the deal as it was being priced.
The demand that produced this was not close. The public offer — a ₹30,213 crore (about $3.1–3.2 billion) fresh issue, on top of an ₹8,110 crore anchor book from 212 institutional investors placed the day before the window opened — ended up covered 22.19 times across all three statutory buckets by the time bidding closed October 23, far beyond the roughly 2.5x figure reported after just the first day. Tracked against where the stock sits now on Zorro's recent-IPO page, that's a deal where the subscription multiple and the listing-day price both pointed the same direction, repeatedly, all week.
Zetwerk's premium opens, then evaporates by mid-morning
Zetwerk Manufacturing Businesses tells the opposite story, and the useful part is how quickly it turned. The stock listed on October 23 at ₹159.25 on the NSE — a 5.5% premium over its ₹151 issue price, a respectable open for a deal we covered as badly undersubscribed going into its final bidding day. That premium didn't survive the morning. By roughly 10:10 a.m. the same day, shares had fallen to about ₹148.50 on the BSE — down 6.6% from the opening print and, more pointedly, below the ₹151 issue price itself. A deal that opened at a gain closed its first hour underwater.
That reversal is consistent with what the book-building data had already flagged. Zetwerk's public offer never cleared even half its shares across the five-day window that closed October 19, with the issue reportedly covered only about a quarter of the way through the bidding period before a late surge got the final multiple closer to 3–4.5x — a fraction of Jio's 22x. A book that fills late and thin tends to be held by investors with less conviction about where the stock should trade once it's actually liquid, and that's roughly what played out within hours of the opening bell.
Same anchor-lock mechanism, same week, different scripts
Both deals ran their anchor allocations under the identical SEBI rule: institutions that commit in the anchor tranche the day before the public window opens are locked up, with half their shares released after 30 days and the rest after 90 — a mechanism covered in more detail here. That lockup means neither Jio's climb nor Zetwerk's reversal on day one was anchor investors cashing out; it was the free-float portion — the shares allotted through the regular QIB, NII and retail buckets — doing the actual price discovery. Jio's free float found buyers willing to pay more than the opening print all session. Zetwerk's found sellers within the first hour.
What the open print doesn't tell you
The lesson sits a level below either headline. A listing-day premium over issue price is a snapshot of the first trade, not a verdict on the stock — Zetwerk's opening 5.5% gain and its first-hour 6.6% reversal are both real prices, just thirty minutes apart. Jio's own day shows the same thing from the other direction: a 21% opening pop that then kept extending rather than fading is a stronger signal than the opening number alone, precisely because it held up as more of the free float actually traded. Both deals remain on Zorro's IPO pipeline history now that they've listed, and the next test for each — whether Jio's premium holds once the broader market digests a $136 billion debut, and whether Zetwerk's price stabilizes above or below its ₹151 issue price in the weeks ahead — will say more about durable demand than anything in the window that priced either deal.