LIC IPO issue price set at Rs 949; may get listed on Tuesday: Report

Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) of India has set the initial public offering (IPO) issue price at Rs 949, which is at the top-end of the indicative range, said a report in the Economic Times.

The LIC IPO sold in the range of Rs 902-949 from May 4 to May 9. LIC is the biggest IPO in the history of Indian stock markets. Owing to the strong demand from the retail investors, policyholders, and employees of the company, the IPO was subscribed 2.85 times on the final day of bidding.

The insurance giant of India received bids for 478.3 million shares against the 162 million on sale (excluding the anchor book), according to the exchange data. The issue broke the 14-year-old record of Anil Ambani's Reliance Power share sale that drew 4.8 million applications in 2008. LIC received more than 7.3 million applications.

Overall, the LIC IPO was subscribed 2.95 times at the end of the six-day bidding period which ended on Monday, May 9. Against 162,078,067 shares on offer, 478,325,760 bids were received, according to data posted on stock exchanges.

The Qualified Institutional Buyers (QIBs) category was subscribed 2.83 times. As many as 112 million bids were received for the 39.5 million shares earmarked for the segment. Within the QIB segment, domestic financial institutions and mutual funds bid for around 57.8 million shares, while that by foreign institutional investors was less than half at 24.1 million shares.

Regarding non-institutional investors (NIIs), a total of 86,193,060 bids were received for 29,648,427 shares reserved for the category, reflecting a subscription of 2.91 times.

Retail individual investors bid for 137.7 million shares as against 69 million shares on offer for the segment, translating into an over-subscription of 1.99 times. The policyholders' portion was subscribed a little over 6 times, while that for employees was subscribed 4.4 times.

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

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..

As of December 2021, LIC had a market share of 61.6 per cent in terms of premiums or gross written premium, 61.4 per cent in terms of new business premium, 71.8 per cent in terms of the number of individual policies issued and 88.8 per cent in terms of the number of group policies.