The upcoming IPO of the country’s leading telecom company Reliance Jio is being discussed everywhere. From small investors to big industrialists in the market, all eyes are on this IPO. Amidst this atmosphere, Nitin Kamath, founder of brokerage firm Zerodha, remembered an incident from ten years ago. On Wednesday, Kamath took to social media platform LinkedIn to reminisce about 2015 and how the advent of Jio changed the face of India’s digital economy.

In fact, in the year 2015, the Economic Times released a list of 10 such businessmen of the country for the year 2016, on whom everyone was watching. In this list, Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani was ranked first while Nitin Kamath is ranked sixth. At that time Jio was preparing to enter the telecom sector. On the other hand, Zerodha took a big decision at the same time to make delivery brokerage completely free. Because of this decision, Kamath got a place in that special list.

Called himself an ant in front of Reliance

While sharing a screenshot of this old list, Nitin Kamath wrote that at that time he was shocked to see his name alongside a big name like Mukesh Ambani. He had no expectation that he would be included in such a list. At that time Zerodha was a very small company.

Expressing his views very clearly, Kamath said that compared to the size of Reliance or Jio, we were ants even then, we are still ants today. He said that looking back today it is not surprising how big a company Jio has become. What is most surprising is how much Jio has changed the way things work in India. It has helped start and grow numerous new businesses in the country.

Zerodha’s fortunes changed thanks to cheap internet data

Online companies like Zerodha have benefited the most from the digital infrastructure that has been built in India over the past decade. Nitin Kamath attributed his company’s success to the country’s digital system. He clearly stated that without Aadhaar or UPI, Zerodha would never have reached where it is today.

Along with this, he considered the contribution of telecom companies to be equally important. According to Kamath, Jio along with Airtel has made mobile data very affordable for common people. This enabled millions of Indians to connect to the Internet for the first time. Availability of cheap internet from villages to small towns has opened a new avenue for online business.

After Corona, a strong boom was seen in the stock market

Access to cheap data paved the way for the rapid growth of the Indian stock market after the Corona pandemic. Kamath said that if this strong digital infrastructure did not exist, most of the businesses operating online today would be very small. Not only that, many of today’s consumer business models don’t even exist.

Kamath also presented investor statistics to explain this shift in the market. He said that in the year 2016, the number of unique investors who invested money in the stock market in India was around 2 crore. Today this figure has crossed 13 crores. Kamath believes that Jio has played a major role in connecting crores of new people to the market.

What Kamath said on Jio IPO withholding money?

In his post, Nitin Kamath did not give a direct opinion on whether ordinary investors should invest money in Jio’s upcoming IPO or not. However, he drew attention to a very interesting coincidence. He said that the telecom companies that helped make India’s capital market so big, today the same market is going to help Jio raise funds.

The CEO of Zerodha concluded his speech with a profound statement related to the world of business. He wrote that when we look from the outside, we often forget how dependent our own success is on the infrastructure built by others.