ICICI Prudential Life Insurance IPO subscribed 16% in opening day

The initial public offering (IPO) of ICICI Prudential Life Insurance on Monday was subscribed nearly 16 percent, according to data from stock exchanges.

As of 5 p.m. Monday, the data showed that the IPO issue received applications for 2,08, 93,356 shares as against an offer of 13,23,78,973 on the opening day of the offerings.

The three-day share sale, which opened on Monday, will close on September 21 and the price brand for the issue is set at Rs 300-334 apiece.

The qualified institutional buyers category which includes foreign institutional investors,and domestic financial institutions was subscribed 5.8 percent, while the non-institutional category comprising corporate and high-net-worth individuals was subscribed 4.4 percent.

Retail investors, whose investments cannot surpass Rs.2 lakh per individual, subscribed nearly 25 percent of the 5,71,22,434 shares offered to them.

Presently, ICICI Bank holds 67.52 percent stake while Prudential Corp. Holdings Ltd has 25.83 percent in the India's largest private sector life insurer.

The ICICI Bank is targeting to divest a 12.63 percent stake in the life insurance firm through the offer-for-sale (OFS) route. Prudential is also expected to reduce its stake in insurance company by up to 5.83 percent after its listing as part of the revised terms of the joint venture (JV) agreement.

As part of the Rs 6,056 crore public issue, the ICICI Bank Ltd on Friday had raised Rs 1,635.33 crore by selling 48.96 million shares of the insurance firm to institutional investors via an anchor allotment at Rs 334 apiece, the upper end price band for the IPO.

The anchor book is the part of an IPO issue that bankers allocate to institutional investors on a discretionary basis. This subscription opens before the IPO kicks off.

Investment banks hired to manage the share sale are ICICI Securities Ltd and DSP Merrill Lynch, CLSA India Pvt. Ltd, Deutsche Equities India Pvt. Ltd, JM Financial Institutional Securities Ltd, SBI Capital Markets Ltd, Edelweiss Financial Services Ltd, HSBC Securities and Capital Markets (India) Pvt. Ltd, IIFL Holdings Ltd and UBS Securities India Pvt. Ltd.

--IANS

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