ESAF Small's big listing

A swanky new listing on the bourses today; as against the IPO price of Rs.60, the stock got listed on the BSE at Rs.71.90 and on the NSE at Rs.71, a 19% premium. It rose to Rs.74.70 but is now trading at Rs.71.

ESAF Small Finance Bank undertook the IPO to comply with RBI regulations to list by 31st July 2021. This was the bank’s 3rd attempt at IPO, with earlier two SEBI permissions for Mar 2020 and Oct 2021 filings having expired. This time too, the OFS size was halved and fresh issue component trimmed by 20% from DRHP filed in Jul 2023.

The IPO though did well – the Rs.463 crore IPO was subscribed 73.15 times on the final day of bidding. Qualified Institutional Buyer was subscribed the biggest at 173.52x, followed by HNIs at 84.37x, Retail investors at 16.97x and Employee portion of 4.36x.

In the IPO Analysis, we had concluded, “Attractive pricing makes the IPO an ‘apply’, especially for the short term view.”