INITIAL PENSIVE OFFERINGS

CALL IT THE ZOMATO MOMENT. On July 23, as the foodtech major prepared to list on the Indian stock exchanges, it had everyone biting their nails, wondering if this was going to work. After all, Zomato had losses of ₹816.43 crore in 2020-21, but its valuation in the private funding space jumped from $3.9 billion (about ₹29,000 crore) in December 2020 to around $5.5 billion (a little more than ₹40,000 crore) in February this year. Would the public valuation match the private one? Would investors bite into a loss-making start-up’s story? Would the company’s private investors make a killing or get killed by staking their, um, stakes in the stock markets? Well, look at it how you will, but Zomato’s IPO was an unqualified success—it was subscribed nearly 23 times, and the company mopped up ₹9,375 crore from the issue. The stock touched a high of ₹138 on the day of listing—a gain of nearly 82 per cent over its issue price of ₹76. By all accounts, the company’s private investors did make a killing. As on September 9, the stock closed at ₹141.55, market capitalisation stood at ₹1,11,049 crore, and founder Deepinder Goyal’s net worth stood at close to ₹5,230 crore on a shareholding of a mere 4.71 per cent.

There have been instances in the past where celebrated IPOs have come a cropper, leaving investors wringing their hands in despair. Memories of the Reliance Power IPO in 2008 are still fresh

Zomato’s success has put a muscular gale behind an already accelerating primary market in 2021. Market experts predict that the current calendar year could see IPOs worth an eye-popping ₹1 lakh crore, a handsome margin over the current record of ₹67,147 crore raised in 2017. “We believe an IPO raise of ₹1 lakh crore