RIL Shares Hit New All-Time High; Up 85% From March Lows

The rally in the share price of Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) continues in the second half of the week. Shares of the oil-to-telecom conglomerate rose nearly 3 percent on Thursday to a new all-time high of Rs 1,661.

The stock has surged 85 percent from its March lows on investors' bullish sentiments after its fundraising activities. RIL has announced that sale of over 22 percent of the stake in Jio Platforms for $13.72 billion collectively to Facebook, Silver Lake, Vista Equity Partners, General Atlantic, KKR, Mubadala, ADIA, TPG and L Catterton since 22 April.

Also, earlier this week, Gulf News citing an unnamed source said that Saudi Arabia's wealth fund Public Investment Fund (PIF) will be buying 2.33 percent stake in Mukesh Ambani-led conglomerate's digital arm for an estimated $1.5 billion. If the said deal completes, with this investment Jio Platforms will have diluted 25 percent of its equity to the long list of foreign investors, in a span of 8 weeks.

RIL also recently completed a mega rights issue with a 1.6 times subscription. The partly paid shares of RIL that were offered in the rights issue, that were listed on Monday at a premium and have been performing well on the exchanges.

Brokerages have turned bullish on the whole of the Indian telecom sector that stands to gain from the work-from-home activity in increasing their number of subscribers. Bernstein in a report on Wednesday said that Reliance Jio is likely to capture 48 percent of Indian mobile subscriber market share by 2025 with over half a billion users.

"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 report said.

The recent fundraising is also in line with RIL's goal to become a zero net debt company by March 2021.