IPOs beat slump blues, open high

Despite the equity markets remaining highly volatile and dropping close to five per cent in 2015 till date, a majority of initial public offers (IPO) that had hit the market this year have managed to deliver impressive returns to investors. Out of 18 companies that had raised money from the primary market, the shares of 11 companies are trading at a significant premium to their issue price.

While VRL Logistics, whose IPO got listed in April this year has gained 114.56 per cent, shares of companies like PNC Infratech, Syngene International and Interglobe Aviation have rallied over 40 per cent from their issue price. “The IPO performance so far has been really good considering the track record of the primary market during the last couple of years,” observed Girish Nadkarni, managing director, Motilal Oswal Investment Advisors.

According to him, some of those IPO’s which have slipped into the negative territory post listing are not trading at a huge discount to their issue price, which also suggest that the quality of companies tapping the primary market has improved a lot in recent times.

However, experts feel that the participation of retail investors in the forthcoming public offers would depend a lot on the prevailing secondary market sentiments. “The performance of the recently listed IPO’s and secondary market sentiment will be a major factor for retail participation in forthcoming IPO’s,” added Mr Nadkarni.

But, G.S. Ganesh, founder of Inga Capital, is not very impressed with the retail participation in the primary market this year. “The retail participation is still very low when compared to what we saw in the 1990’s and mid 2000’s. I am not seeing that kind of frenzy now,” he said.