As the Rs 6,560-crore IPO for Bajaj Housing Finance closed in the evening, there were about 89 lakh investors who had shown interest in buying the company’s shares on offer.As a result, the IPO generated a demand for about Rs 3.2 lakh crore – an oversubscription figure of more than 67 times (excluding the anchor investor part). The number of applications and the demand book value, both were new records for the primary market in India.
Data from Axis Capital, one of the lead managers to the IPO, showed that the institutional portion of the offer was subscribed 222 times and the part reserved for high net worth investors (HNIs) was subscribed nearly 44 times. The part reserved for shareholders of Bajaj Finance and Bajaj Finserv was subscribed 17.4 times. In addition, the portion reserved for retail investors were subscribed over seven times while the employee portion was subscribed more than twice.
Excluding the Rs 1,758-crore worth of shares which were allotted to anchor investors a day before opening of the IPO, shares worth Rs 4,802 crore were offered for bidding in the price band of Rs 66 to Rs 70-per-share.
The Bajaj Housing Finance IPO had opened on Sept 9. On Day 1 itself, it was subscribed twice over and more than seven times by the end of Day 2, an unusual trend even in the current frenzied primary market, veterans of Dalal Street had pointed out. They also pointed out that the historical strong returns from the two Bajaj group companies in the BFSI space – Bajaj Finance and Bajaj Finserv – also had a rub-off effect on Bajaj Housing Finance IPO. In the last 10 years, Bajaj Finance’s stock has gone up by 28 times while Bajaj Finserv’s is up 17 times. In addition, there were dividends from these companies in each of the last 10 years, data on BSE showed.
The record-breaking IPO also lifted marketmen’s expectations for a blockbuster listing of the stock, set for Monday, Sept 16.
In the grey market, the unofficial non-deliverable market for high-risk traders, the indicative listing price for the stock is Rs 145, more than twice its offer price of Rs 70, the upper end of the band.
