The Empowered Group of Ministers (EGoM) on the share sale of state-owned Coal India Ltd (CIL), in what should be the country’s largest Initial Public Offer (IPO) so far, is likely to decide on issuing shares to anchor investors in another week.
“The EGoM will meet by month-end to decide on the anchor investor issue,” said Chairman Partha S Bhattacharyya on the sidelines of a coal sector event.
Anchor investors are those who buy shares of the company before the launch of a public issue. Such an investor cannot be a promoter of the issuer company and can be allocated as much as 30 per cent of the portion reserved for Qualified Institutional Buyers. And, must bid for at least Rs 10 crore worth of shares.
There has been speculation that the company might not require allotment of shares for anchor investors as part of the IPO plan.
IPO to stay open a day longer for HNIs, retail investors
With an aim to attract more funds from high networth individuals (HNIs) and retail investors, CIL today said its mega IPO would stay open for them a day longer than institutional buyers.
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The book building for qualified institutional buyers would close a day prior to the bid’s closing date, Bhattacharyya, said.
The public sector undertaking’s four-day public issue is expected to take-off on October 18. The model (entire day for retail and HNIs) helped several companies that hit the market with their offers recently to attract more participation from the non-institutional investors. This was followed in the recently-concluded public offers of SKS Microfinance, Bajaj Corp and state-run Engineers India, where they saw a huge response from retail investors and HNIs.