Source Credit : Portfolio Prints
India's largest stock exchange, the National Stock Exchange (NSE), has filed draft papers for an initial public offering (IPO) that is expected to be one of the country's biggest listings this year.
The IPO will be entirely an offer for sale (OFS), with several major domestic and international investors reducing their stakes in the exchange.
Among the 10 shareholders participating in the share sale are India's largest public-sector lender, State Bank of India, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB), and Singapore's Temasek Holdings.
The draft prospectus did not disclose details regarding the IPO's pricing or valuation. According to market experts, regulatory approval from India's capital markets regulator typically takes two to three months.
India is among the world's top 10 equity markets, with a total market capitalization of about 474 trillion rupees ($5 trillion), and NSE remains the country's dominant exchange. According to the filing, it commands a 93% share of India's cash equity market, nearly 100% of equity futures trading, and around 75% of equity options trading.
NSE, which has been pursuing a public listing since 2016, has more than 129 million unique registered investors.
Its domestic rival, BSE, is significantly smaller in terms of trading volumes. BSE currently has a market capitalization of approximately $17.2 billion and trades at a trailing 12-month price-to-earnings ratio of 66.
India's IPO market has recently slowed as investor sentiment weakened amid geopolitical tensions in the Middle East. Several large public offerings were postponed, but activity is beginning to recover as the conflict involving Iran shows signs of easing.
Reliance Jio Infocomm, the telecommunications arm of billionaire Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries and India's largest wireless operator, is also expected to file papers for a roughly $4 billion public offering on or before June 19, according to a Financial Times report published on Wednesday.
With an estimated combined fundraising of more than 600 billion rupees (over $6.3 billion), the NSE and Reliance Jio IPOs alone could account for nearly one-third of the total capital raised through India's 104 mainboard IPOs last year, said Prashant Rao, Director and Head of Equity Capital Markets at Anand Rathi Investment Banking.
