Primary market remains listless

MUMBAI, NOV 5: The primary capital market continues to remain listless. It is now for the sixteenth month in the running that the primary ma...

MUMBAI, NOV 5: The primary capital market continues to remain listless. It is now for the sixteenth month in the running that the primary market has witnessed an extremely low level of activity in terms of public issue with only such issue between July 1997 and October 1998.

Like July and August, the month of October witnessed only one public issue, and this too, like the earlier two months, was debt issue from ICICI. While in September 1998, figures have all been very low: August 1, July 1, June 5, May 3, April 2, March 2, February 0, January 4, December 1997 6, November 4, October 4, September 1, August 3 and July 2.

According to PRIME, between April and October this year, only 19 public issues have hit the market. In terms of amount, almost the entire mobilisation has taken place through the four debt issues from ICICI and one from IDBI. These together, at Rs 2843 crore, have constituted 90 per cent of the period8217;s total mobilisation of Rs 3175 crore.

In addition to this,the banks have mobilised Rs 216 crore, through equity. The financial institutions and banks, as such, have together raised Rs 3059 crore, constituting 96 per cent of the period8217;s total amount, significantly up from a meagre 4 per cent in 1994-95.

Alarmingly, the public issue mobilisation by the private manufacturing sector, according to PRIME, continues to languish, with a raising of only Rs 111 crore through just 8 issues in the first seven months. This represents a major fall successively over the last 3 years, from a high of Rs 11005 crore in full 1994-95.

Worse, even this paltry amount of Rs 111 crore has not come from the investing public. Prithvi Haldea of PRIME states that poor sentiments and scepticism, compounded by consistent poor quality of issues which abound despite entry barriers, have seen the investors reject all of these 8 offerings. The two NBFC issues aggregating Rs 5 crore also were only technical8217; issues.

For the second year in running, equity mobilisation, according to PRIME, hassuffered, adversely affecting the industrial activity. Such public issues have raised only Rs 332 crore in the seven month period; the amount in corresponding periods of 1996 and 1997 were Rs 2599 crore and Rs 734 crore respectively.

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The high point was full 1994-95 when Rs 13312 crore was raised through equity. The initial public offerings IPOs have, of course, all but vanished. Such issues had already fallen from a high of 1350 in 1995-96 to 716 in 1996-97 to only 51 in 1997-98.