
Image: TFIPOST
Harried bankers race the clock in Mumbai’s sleek skyscrapers to appraise a company that hasn’t been valued in decades. In New Delhi, bureaucrats work through the night, despite power outages, to put together an initial public offering to rival any in Asia this year.
In the hinterlands, front-page newspaper advertisements inform over 250 million policyholders about the opportunity to own a piece of a company that is nearly as old as post-independence India.
For nearly two years, India has been preparing for a mammoth task: preparing India’s largest insurer, with nearly $500 billion in assets and a valuation of up to $203 billion, for what could be the country’s largest-ever stock listing. The public offering of Life Insurance Corporation of India, or LIC, has been dubbed “India’s Aramco moment” by some bankers. LIC’s debut, like the Gulf oil giant’s $29.4 billion IPO, will test the depth of the country’s capital markets and the global appetite for its state-owned crown jewel.
Getting a Glimpse of a Giant
“The due internal valuation, which is required to be done almost annually by a company of that size. It hasn’t been done,” India’s finance minister, Nirmala Sitharaman, said in an October interview with Bloomberg.
“All of the essentials of keeping valuations in tip-top shape As well as the efforts required to keep the valued correctly — are being completed right now.”
Investors are looking for answers.
An All-India Hault
India’s tangled bureaucracy has turned into a pressure cooker as the deadline approaches. When New Delhi’s power grid goes down, officials from the Department of Disinvestment work all night, double-checking hundreds of filings and opening their doors to let in the weak winter sunlight.
Rural Indians are scrambling to ensure that they are eligible for a slice of the pie.
“It’s best to be prepared in life,” LIC has begun sending SMS blasts to its agents and running newspaper ads with the headline “It’s best to be prepared in life.”