Jio Has a ₹76,255 Cr EBITDA Business. So Why Is It Paying Down ₹27,500 Cr of Debt?

Before Jio rings the bell on India's largest ever IPO, it is doing something unglamorous. Repaying ₹27,500 crore of debt.

A company that makes ₹76,255 crore in EBITDA does not need to. It is choosing to.

Jio Platforms is Mukesh Ambani's telecom and digital business, the company behind India's largest mobile network. It already carries very little debt for its size. The repayment is not a rescue. It is a company tidying its balance sheet to the last rupee before it asks the public for a price. Why it bothers is a clean lesson in how capital actually works.

Debt built the network

Start with where the debt came from, because it explains why it is there at all.

A telecom network is one of the most capital-hungry things a company can build. You buy spectrum from the government, you put up hundreds of thousands of towers, you lay fibre across a subcontinent, and you do all of it years before the revenue catches up. No amount of early profit funds that. It is paid for with debt, and it should be. Debt is the correct instrument for a large, predictable, long-lived asset that will throw off cash for decades.

Jio built the network that way. It borrowed to buy spectrum and to lay the infrastructure that now carries 524 million subscribers. The debt on its books is not a sign that something went wrong. It is the residue of something that went right. A national network exists because someone was willing to fund it before it paid.

The cash machine

Then the revenue caught up, and then some.

In FY26 Jio Platforms produced about ₹1,46,885 crore of revenue and ₹76,255 crore of EBITDA. That is an EBITDA margin close to 52 percent, which means roughly 52 paise of every rupee of revenue drops to operating profit before interest, tax and depreciation. Very few businesses of any size, anywhere, run at that level. Its EBITDA grew about 19 percent in a single year, from around ₹64,000 crore in FY25.

Figure 1. Jio Platforms FY26, an EBITDA margin close to 52 percent.

Hold that against the debt for a moment. The ₹27,500 crore Jio is repaying is less than five months of its own EBITDA. A business generating this much cash could clear that debt from operations without noticing. So the repayment is not about whether Jio can afford its debt. It is about something else entirely.

Already lightly levered

Here is the part that reframes the whole question.

Jio is not a heavily indebted company straining under its borrowings. By FY26 its net leverage, the ratio of net debt to EBITDA, had fallen to about 0.36 times. Two years earlier, in FY24, it was about 0.88 times. The company had already been paying its debt down steadily, and even before the IPO it sat at a level most large companies would consider conservative.

Figure 2. Net debt to EBITDA. This is not a distressed balance sheet.

So the headline framing, a profitable giant still weighed down by debt, is not what the numbers show. The numbers show a company that was already lightly levered and is now choosing to go further. That choice is the interesting part, not any distress, because there is no distress to speak of.

So why repay now

Because of what comes next. A public listing.

When a company lists, the market prices it on the cleanliness of its balance sheet as much as the strength of its business. Debt is a claim that sits ahead of shareholders. The less of it there is, the more of the company's cash flow belongs to the new public investors, and the lower the risk they are being asked to underwrite. Retiring debt just before an IPO is not housekeeping. It is price optimisation. A cleaner balance sheet earns a better multiple.

Figure 3. Planned use of Jio Platforms' all-fresh-issue IPO proceeds.

Two details make the point sharper. First, the ₹27,500 crore is about 73 percent of the entire IPO. Nearly three-quarters of India's biggest ever listing exists to retire external commercial borrowings, not to fund some new adventure. Second, the offer is 100 percent fresh issue, with no offer for sale. No existing shareholder is selling a single share into this listing. That tells you the raise is for the company, to strengthen the company, and not a moment for insiders to cash out.

Put together, the story is not a profitable company burdened by debt. It is a profitable company using the best possible moment, a public listing at scale, to reset its balance sheet to something close to net cash before the public arrives.

The turn, in one table

Metric	FY25	FY26
Revenue	about ₹1,28,000 Cr	₹1,46,885 Cr
EBITDA	about ₹64,000 Cr	₹76,255 Cr
EBITDA margin	about 50%	about 52%

What this teaches, and what it does not

The lesson travels a long way down from Jio's scale. The instrument follows the phase. You build capital-heavy assets with debt, because debt is patient and does not dilute. You list with equity, because equity is permanent and prices growth. And in between, if you are disciplined, you clean up the balance sheet so the equity you sell is worth more. Debt to build, equity to list, deleverage in between. That sequence is the same whether the numbers have four zeros or nine.

Now the honest limit, because pretending otherwise would be silly. Jio's single debt repayment, ₹27,500 crore, is about 275 times the entire top of Debtsify's range. Debtsify arranges ₹5 crore to ₹100 crore. It will never sit anywhere near a Jio, and nothing about a national telecom's balance sheet is a Debtsify transaction. The scale does not transfer. The principle does.

For a mid-market company with real revenue, the applicable version is smaller and more immediate. When you have predictable cash flow, debt is the cheaper way to fund a specific, repayable need, because it does not cost you ownership. When you are about to raise equity, you do not want to be forced into it at a bad price by a short-term gap you could have bridged. The most profitable company in the country carries debt deliberately and repays it deliberately, matching the instrument to the moment. A founder with a fraction of the revenue can run the same discipline on a fraction of the balance sheet.

What we can say from our own desk

Three things we see directly.

Speed is the point of a bridge. Where a facility is arranged, it moves in 48 to 72 hours, with funds typically reaching the company's primary treasury by Day 4. A company managing a timing gap does not have a quarter to wait.

The most common reason a company is declined is that its revenue is too small or too unpredictable to service repayment in a flat case. Predictable cash flow is exactly what makes debt safe, for Jio and for a company a thousandth its size. The test is the same. Only the numbers change.

The companies this suits sit across manufacturing and industrials, D2C and consumer, SaaS and technology, and services. What they share is not a sector. It is revenue you can underwrite.

One number we do not publish, because we will not estimate it. Out of the last 100 enquiries we received, the count that resulted in a funded facility depends on the revenue quality behind them, and we would rather leave the figure open than print one we cannot stand behind.

Key takeaways

• Jio Platforms produced about ₹76,255 crore of EBITDA in FY26 on revenue of about ₹1,46,885 crore, an EBITDA margin close to 52 percent. The ₹27,500 crore of debt it is repaying is less than five months of that EBITDA.
• The debt is not a problem. Jio built a national network on borrowing, which is the correct way to fund a large, predictable, long-lived asset. By FY26 its net leverage had already fallen to about 0.36 times, from about 0.88 times in FY24.
• The repayment is a pre-IPO choice, not a rescue. About 73 percent of the raise goes to retiring external commercial borrowings, and the offer is 100 percent fresh issue with no shareholder selling. A cleaner balance sheet earns a better price at listing.
• The transferable lesson is to match the instrument to the phase. Debt builds, equity lists, and disciplined companies deleverage in between. The scale of Jio does not apply to a mid-market company. The discipline does.

Frequently asked questions

• Why is Jio repaying debt if it is so profitable? Not because it has to. Jio Platforms makes about ₹76,255 crore of EBITDA a year, and the ₹27,500 crore of debt it is repaying is less than five months of that. It is repaying ahead of its IPO because a cleaner, lower-debt balance sheet earns a better price and lowers risk for the new public shareholders.

• How much of Jio's IPO goes to paying off debt? About ₹27,500 crore of the roughly ₹37,700 crore raise, which is close to 73 percent. The money is earmarked to prepay external commercial borrowings. The remainder is for general corporate purposes. The offer is entirely a fresh issue, so no existing shareholder is selling shares into the listing.

• Was Jio heavily in debt? No. By FY26 its net leverage, net debt against EBITDA, had fallen to about 0.36 times, down from about 0.88 times in FY24. That is a conservative level for a company of its size. The debt is the residue of building a national telecom network, which is normally and correctly financed with borrowing.

• Why do profitable companies carry debt at all? Because debt is the right tool for large, predictable, long-lived investments. It is patient, it does not dilute ownership, and its cost is usually lower than the cost of selling equity. A capital-heavy business like a telecom network is built on debt precisely because the asset will generate cash for decades after it is paid for.

• Does this have any lesson for a normal company? Yes, at a smaller scale. Match the instrument to the phase. Fund predictable, repayable needs with debt rather than diluting ownership, and avoid being forced into an equity raise at a bad price by a short-term gap. Jio's numbers are enormous, but the discipline, debt to build and equity to list, is the same for any revenue business.

About Debtsify

Debtsify is a private structured-credit and bridge-financing partner for high-growth Indian companies. It arranges ₹5 Cr to ₹100 Cr in 48 to 72 hours, 100% non-dilutive, with no equity, warrants, board seats, or collateral. It is not a bank, an NBFC-marketplace, or a loan aggregator. It is a capital partner.

This article is for information only. It is not investment, legal or financial advice, and it is not an offer of any facility. Figures on Jio are drawn from Jio Platforms' draft red herring prospectus and press reporting of it, are attributed with dates in the source notes, and should be verified against the primary filing before any decision. Figures, rates and outcomes change.