ICICI Securities First Indian Lead Manager To Top Investment Banking Deal Tables: Report

The country's leading book running lead manager, ICICI Securities, has become first Indian investment bank to rank on top of investment banking deal tables in a record year of the Initial Public Offerings (IPOs). Meanwhile, Axis Bank retained the top slot for debt since 2007, according to BloombergQuint.

For both equity and debt combined, the two Indian companies ranked among the top five. The rest were overseas banks. Last year, four of the top five were foreign with Axis Bank completing the list. The Mumbai-based lender was among the top five in 2020 as well, BloombergQuint's report added.

In the calendar year 2021, a record 63 companies raised over Rs 1.18 lakh crore from the IPOs which has been the best year for Indian IPO markets since inception.

The Indian IPO market was nearly 4.5 times more than the Rs 26,613 crore raised through 15 issues in 2020 and almost double of the previous best of Rs 68,827 crore in 2017, news agency PTI reported citing a report by Prime Database.

Pranav Haldea, managing director of Prime Database Group, said the IPO frenzy was driven by new-age loss-making technology start-ups along with strong retail participation, and the resultant massive listing gains were the key highlights of the year. Another highlight was only 51 per cent or Rs 1,03,621 crore of the total Rs 2,02,009 crore was fresh capital raising and the remaining Rs 98,388 crore were offers for sale.

Overall, public equity fundraising crossed the Rs 2-lakh-crore mark at Rs 2,02,009 crore in 2021 so far, which is higher than the previous high of Rs 1,76,914 crore in 2020, according to the report by Prime Database.

Haldea said the largest main-board IPOs were the One97 Communications (Paytm) issue of Rs 18,300 crore, followed by delivery app Zomato at over Rs 9,300 crore. The average issue size was a high Rs 1,884 crore this year.

Of the 59 issues for which data is available now, 36 received more than 10 times oversubscription, of which six were more than 100 times, while eight were oversubscribed by more than three times. The balance 15 were oversubscribed 1-3 times.