Jio Financial could be listed as soon as September. Yet it is barely up and running, with just $244 million of loans as of March 2022. Its assets mostly comprise a 6% stake in its parent – worth about $12 billion at current market prices; that alone is large enough to make the entity among the top five Indian lenders by book value.The attraction for new shareholders, though, is the potential for Jio to disrupt India’s $1.7 trillion small-loans market.
That’s why analysts at Jefferies reckon the upstart lender can scale up the business rapidly enough to challenge incumbents – and why they thus ascribe a multiple of four to the $1.7 billion book value of Jio’s nascent core financing business. That’s high, putting it nearly on par with where $61 billion mortgage giant Housing Development Finance Corporation