Companies from US, Europe and Australia are among 15 firms in the race to acquire a stake in India's No. 3 asset management firm, UTI, ahead of an IPO, its chairman said. Asset Management Co, with a corpus of Rs 45,000 crore ($11.4 billion) at the end of September, aims to sell 20% of the firm before the IPO, the first by an Indian asset manager.
“We are going to issue 10 million additional shares through private placement,” chairman UK Sinha said. He said companies from US, Europe, Australia, Southeast Asia and the Middle East had approached the fund house for the pre-IPO placement. No company will be offered more than 5%, he said.
Sinha said UTI would appoint bankers for the IPO in the first week of November, but did not say how much he expected to raise.
“We had presentations from 12 investment bankers, the best in the world,” he said. “They have been talking of an amount where the multiples of the exiting investors would be very, very high.”
He did not elaborate, but said the private placement and the IPO would be done in quick succession. SBI, BoB, PNB and LIC – all government-run – hold 25% each of UTI's 50 million shares. After the IPO, in which 19.4 million shares would be sold by existing shareholders, their combined stake would fall to 51%.
India's rapidly growing Rs 4.8-trillion fund industry – led by Reliance Capital and ICICI Prudential – has attracted many global firms, with a booming economy boosting incomes and appetite for investments. This month, Pioneer Global
Investments hands with BoB to re-enter Indian fund industry.
Source: Times of India