: Govt fixes LIC issue price at Rs 949 a share #FinanceIndia #StockMarketNEWS #Business Press Trust of India New Delhi The government has fixed the issue price of LIC shares at Rs 949 apiece,

@StockMarketNEWS Tue 17 May, 2022

Posted in: #FinanceIndia #StockMarketNEWS #Business

Govt fixes LIC issue price at Rs 949 a share #FinanceIndia #StockMarketNEWS #Business
Press Trust of India

New Delhi

The government has fixed the issue price of LIC shares at Rs 949 apiece, the upper end of the IPO price band, ahead of the listing of the country’s largest insurer on May 17.

However, LIC policyholders and retail investors have got the shares at a price of Rs 889 and Rs 904 a piece, respectively.

The Initial Public Offering (IPO) of Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) closed on May 9 and shares were allocated to bidders on May 12. The government sold over 22.13 crore shares or 3.5% stake in LIC through the IPO at a price band of Rs 902-949 a share.

The retail investors and eligible employees of LIC were offered a discount of Rs 45 per equity share over the issue price, while policyholders got a discount of Rs 60 per share.

As per the prospectus filed by LIC on May 12, the offer price of the share sale has been fixed at Rs 949 per equity share.

Shares were allocated to policyholders and retail investors after applying the discount applicable to them.

The share sale fetched the government around Rs 20,557 crore.

The LIC IPO India’s largest to date closed with nearly 3 times subscription, predominately lapped up by retail and institutional buyers, but foreign investor participation remained muted.

So far, the amount mobilised from the IPO of Paytm in 2021 was the largest ever at Rs 18,300 crore, followed by Coal India (2010) at nearly Rs 15,500 crore and Reliance Power (2008) at Rs 11,700 crore.

LIC had last month reduced its IPO size to 3.5% from 5% decided earlier due to the prevailing choppy market conditions. Even after the reduced size of over Rs 20,557 crore, LIC IPO is the biggest initial public offering ever in the country.

LIC will list on the stock exchanges and its shares will start trading from May 17.

The share sale initially planned to hit the markets in March. But the uncertainty in stock markets due to Russia-Ukraine war pushed the issue to current fiscal which begun inApril.

The proceeds from LIC issue makes up for about a-third of the Rs 65,000 crore disinvestment target set for the current fiscal.

While it has already raised Rs 3,000 crore from minority share sale in ONGC, Rs 211.14 crore is likely to come in after handover of Pawan Hans management control to Star9 Mobility Pvt Ltd, a consortium of Big Charter Private Limited, Maharaja Aviation Private Limited and Almas Global Opportunity Fund SPC by June.

In the last fiscal the government mopped up Rs 13,531 crore from disinvestment of central public sector enterprises against the revised scaled down target of Rs 78,000 crore.