IPO Pricing Issues in India

One of the most important issues in floating an IPO is the pricing aspect. Different forces, often in conflict with each other, are at play here. Issuers would ideally like to maximize the proceeds from the process. Investors would want the offer to be under priced at best and to be (near) correctly valued at worst. Underwriter gets a portion of capital raised as fee, and they would want to maximize their income. But if an IPO is overpriced, there may not be sufficient demand from the market and as a result the issuer may not be able to sell all the shares it had planned. The reputation of the underwriter is also at stake here. It has been observed from empirical data that historically IPOs have been under priced. However, the trend regarding pricing of IPOs seen in India over the last one year has followed an opposite pattern. It has been observed, 70% of the 55 firms that went for IPO during the period April, 2010 to March, 2011, are trading below their offer price. Moreover, 70% of the same 55 firms traded at premium on their listing days, but price fell on subsequent trading days. This implies only very short term investors have actually benefited from these offerings. This is even more surprising when one considers IPO performance in conjunction with overall market performance. In August 2009 BSE created an IPO index that tracks the value of companies for two years after IPO starting from the third day of trading. The graph shows the movement of this BSE IPO index along with that of the SENSEX. It is noteworthy, while the two moved in tandem initially, they have diverged from each other since September, 2010. Thus while the SENSEX gained over 10% during April 2010 to March 2011, BSE IPO index fell over 15% during the same period. This implies overall market condition is not to be blamed for the poor performance of the newly listed firms. This does not augur well for the markets. Retail investors, most of whom invest with medium to long term objectives and are not very sophisticated or well informed, suffered heavy losses and may lose interest in the IPO segment. The pricing of IPOs has come under scrutiny from a number of market participants and the capital market regulator, Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), has taken note of the situation. In the past SEBI had expressed its displeasure regarding overpricing of IPOs and asked the underwriting banks to be more prudent regarding IPO pricing. Recently SEBI proposed that underwriting banks must disclose to investors the performance and track records of their earlier issues in their prospectus and on website. The regulator is also concerned about hyping of public issues through misleading advertisements and media reports and could propose strict penalty if underwriters are found to be involved in such activities. Moreover, SEBI has expressed its displeasure over investment banks, vying among each other to bag deals, quoting very low fees from issuers, thereby promoting issuer interest above investor interest.