Infosys brass offers 1.3 crore shares through ADS issue

Infosys directors "" N R Narayana Murthy, Nandan Nilekani, T V Mohandas Pai (head of HR) and five others "" have collectively offered 1.3 crore shares amounting to a little over 2 per cent stake of their holding in Infosys in the third sponsored ADR issue.

This is in keeping with Infy's filing to the United State Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

At Monday's closing of Infy's stock of Rs 2,253.80 on the NSE, this translates to around Rs 3,000 crore. The directors put together currently hold 19.71 per cent. The issue closed on November 17.

A part of the shares tendered are finally accepted at a pro-rata basis on the holding of all the people who have tendered. The price is also simultaneously determined by the investment bankers.

Besides these directors, financial institutions such as Deutsche Bank, J P Morgan Securities, Merrill Lynch, Government of Singapore besides others have offered a total of 1.7 crore shares for this issue. Leading the list is Murthy himself, who has offered 40 lakh shares, followed by Nilekani who has tendered close to 28 lakh shares, while Kris Gopalakrishnan a little over 27 lakh shares.

Following these promoter-directors are K Dinesh and S D Shibulal who have offered around 16.5 lakh shares and close to 18 lakh shares respectively.

Infosys in early October announced that it put on offer 30 million shares, which at current prices, is valued at around $1.5 billion. This is expected to be the biggest overseas share float by an Indian company.

Earlier, Infosys had floated a $300 million issue in 2003 which was followed up by a $1 billion offer in 2005. With this latest issue, the overseas float of Infosys stock is expected to increase by 5 per cent, pushing the total float to 19 per cent from the current 14 per cent which is made up of 77.7 million shares.

The board of Infosys had also decided that as part of this offering, ADSs will be place with Japanese investors through a Public Offer without Listing.