By Hritam Mukherjee
(Reuters) -Food and grocery delivery firm Swiggy’s $1.4 billion IPO was 12% subscribed after its first day of bidding, with retail investors placing orders for more than half the shares reserved for them in India’s second-largest IPO of 2024.
India has been an outlier in Asia with a string of high-profile offerings this year and Swiggy’s IPO comes after a slide in Indian equities in October due to persistent selling by foreign investors and a lacklustre earnings season.
Swiggy has cut its total valuation twice, by a combined 25% to $11.3 billion, after Hyundai Motor India’s record $3.3 billion initial public offering last month, which has not fared well since listing, with its share price down by over 5%.
Swiggy’s IPO opened for bids on Wednesday as Indian shares posted their biggest single-day jump in more than six weeks after Donald Trump’s U.S. presidential election win, with orders due to be taken until Nov. 8 in a 371-390 rupee price range.
Retail investors placed orders for about 54% of the 10% of the shares earmarked for them. Institutional investors have a 75% allocation, with 15% bound for non-institutional buyers such as corporations and high-net-worth individuals.
Anchor investors including Fidelity and Norway’s sovereign wealth fund Norges bought shares worth $605 million on Tuesday.
Swiggy has a solid No. 2 position in India’s food and grocery market behind Zomato. In food delivery, it has 34% of the market compared to Zomato’s 58%, while in quick commerce, Zomato’s Blinkit has an estimated 40-45% and Swiggy’s Instamart has 20-25%, according to brokerage estimates.
“No frenzy has been seen so far in Swiggy’s IPO as we saw in Zomato’s three years back. Zomato has started producing profit while Swiggy is still yet to, hence risk capital is unlikely to move to Swiggy from Zomato,” said Deven Choksey, Managing Director of DRChoksey FinServ.
Zomato shares surged nearly 66% on their debut in 2021 and have since more than tripled to give the company a $26.7 billion market valuation.
Swiggy has a long way to go to match Zomato financially, reporting a 23.5 billion rupee ($280 million) net loss in the year ended March, compared to Zomato’s 3.5 billion rupee profit.
($1 = 84.1900 Indian rupees)
(Reporting by Hritam Mukherjee in Bengaluru; Editing by Chris Thomas, Edwina Gibbs and Alexander Smith)
