New Delhi: The much-awaited initial public offering (IPO) of Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) is coming to an end as the state-run insurer is likely to file a preliminary IPO prospectus on Tuesday, sources, who are directly involved in the IPO process, told Reuters.
The central government is looking to offload a 3.5 per cent stake in the state-owned insurance behemoth.
According to news reports, the IPO is expected to launch in the first week of May.
The sources said that the price band for per equity share is likely to be announced on Wednesday.
LIC IPO Road Shows
According to the report, on Wednesday the management of the life insurance and the investment bankers will begin road shows in six cities across the country where they will be meeting potential investors and analysts, one of the sources said.
The cities shortlisted for the road shows, which are likely to be conducted by the end of this week, are Mumbai, New Delhi, Bengaluru, Ahmedabad, Rajkot, Kolkata.
The LIC management has decided to re-start road shows as Covid-19 disease is slowing down significantly. In the past two year due to the pandemic, physical road shows and programmes had come to a grinding halt.
The source told Reuters that apart from these programmes, online road shows covering investors across other regions will also continue.
The central government has cut down the size of the LIC IPO drastically to Rs 30,000 crore from Rs 60,000 crore.
Amid geo-political tensions arising out of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, anchor investors had been reluctant to commit in the mega IPO. Simultaneously investors continue to pull money out from India, with foreign funds of more than $16 billion have been withdrawn from Indian stocks this year. All these compelled the government to postponed the listing till May.