OfBusiness hires Axis, JPMorgan, Citi among other banks for 2025 Indian IPO

SoftBank-backed Indian shopping website OfBusiness has appointed five investment banks including India's Axis Capital, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan for its up to $1 billion IPO targetted for 2025, a top executive told Reuters on Wednesday.

Citigroup and Bank of America have also been given the mandate to manage the stock offering which the company aims to launch late next year, said Chief Financial Officer Bhavesh Keswani.

Reuters is first to report the bank appointments for OfBusiness' IPO. They come amid a flurry of IPOs in India - 290 companies have raised more than $15.5 billion as of mid-November, more than double the amount raised last year, data compiled by LSEG shows.

OfBusiness' website offers raw materials such as steel, pulses and textiles to businesses, and the company was last valued at around $5 billion in 2021. It also exports food and apparel to clients such as Lulu, Costco and Tommy Hilfiger.

OfBusiness aims to seek approval for the IPO from India's market regulator between March and June, and list in late 2025 as it remains unconcerned by the recent market correction in India, said Nitin Jain, its co-founder.

"We are very clear we are not going to time the market, we are profitable," Jain said, adding that the process of merging and integrating some internal businesses ahead of the IPO was ongoing.

Japanese tech investor SoftBank Group and US based investment firm Tiger Global have a roughly 15 per cent stake collectively in OfBusiness, while international investment firm Alpha Wave Global holds 18 per cent.

Reuters in September reported OfBusiness was targeting a valuation between $6 billion and $9 billion in its IPO, but both the executives declined to comment on that on Wednesday.

In the fiscal year that ended in March, the company made a $72.6 million after-tax profit on revenue of $2.3 billion.