India ranks 9th in global IPOs

BIG BANG IN THE PRIMARY MARKET

With two months to go for the close of the current calendar year, India's mobilisation through initial public offers (IPO) has jumped 166 per cent compared with the mop-up during the same time last year.

According to Thomson Financial, India's IPO volumes totalled $7 billion from 74 issues so far this year, surpassing the previous year's (the whole year) IPO volumes.

India now ranks the ninth largest IPO market in the world, capturing 3 per cent of the global market share, up from a mere 1.3 per cent share in the year-ago period.

Among Brazil, Russia, India and China (Bric), only Brazil and India increased their IPO proceeds two-fold, recording a rise of 292.4 per cent and 166.2 per cent respectively.

DLF's Rs 9,187 crore public offer has remained the largest in India on record. The offer was jointly underwritten by DSP Merrill Lynch, Kotak Mahindra, Citi, Lehman Brothers, UBS, and ICICI Bank.

According to the Thomson Financial data, India has established the largest IPO and the largest follow-on offer on record, all issued this year.

The largest IPO was DLF's Rs 9,187 crore and the largest Indian share offering on record was ICICI's follow-on issue worth $4.6 billion.

The largest Indian convertible issue of all times was that of Reliance Communications worth $1 billion.

Indian deal-making also marked a record, with the announced M&As reaching the $61.3 billion in value, the highest, first, ten-month volume on record.

The third quarter of the calendar year also posted record volumes with $12.2 billion from 326 deals. this is a significant increase from the third quarter volumes of $7.4 billion in 2006 and $6.2 billion in 2005.

Between January and October this year, the in-bound volumes of the country's cross-border M&As more than tripled, amounting to $29.8 billion from 293 deals compared with $9.2 billion from 289 transactions in the year-ago period.

The cross-border, in-bound volumes this year so far also surpassed the volumes in 2006 worth $10.4 billion.

India has emerged the third most active nation for private equity (PE) activity in Asia-Pacific this year, with a market share of 7.6 per cent. The Indian PE deals touched $4.5 billion, a big difference from $2.4 billion in 2006. However, no PE deal was announced in the country in September 2007.

The country's cross-border, out-bound volumes decreased to $22.2 billion this year compared with $22.8 billion in 2006.

Indian companies preferred to acquire targets in the United States, amounting to $9.7 billion, almost half of India's cross-border, out-bound deals.