NSE Targets September 18 IPO Opening in Bid to Become India's Largest-Ever Listing at Rs 30,000 Crore

Since Sebi cleared NSE's offer document earlier this month, ending nearly a decade of regulatory delay, the exchange has moved to lock in a listing calendar. Sources cited by PTI and Reuters, and reported by the Economic Times, Rediff, the Times of India, and the Tribune, say the price band will be announced September 15, the anchor book opens September 17, and the public issue runs September 18, 21, and 22. Listing is targeted for September 25. NSE has made no official announcement.

The timing is not accidental. Sources told these outlets the schedule was built to get shares listed before Pitru Paksha, the 16-day period in the Hindu lunar calendar beginning September 26 that many Indian investors consider inauspicious for new financial commitments.

At roughly Rs 30,000 crore, the offering would beat Hyundai Motor India's Rs 27,870-crore IPO from 2024 to become India's largest-ever public issue. NSE runs the benchmark Nifty 50 index and is the world's most active exchange by derivatives contract volume, according to Rediff.

Nobody at NSE gets a rupee

This is a pure offer for sale. Existing shareholders are selling up to 148.9 million shares, face value Re 1 each, representing about 6% of NSE's paid-up equity. There is no fresh issue. NSE itself raises nothing from its own IPO. Every rupee goes to the sellers.

According to the Times of India, citing the offer document, the SBI group is the largest seller, offloading roughly 1.6 crore shares directly plus another 87.8 lakh through SBI Capital Markets. Other major sellers include MS Strategic (Mauritius) with 1.6 crore shares, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board with about 1.2 crore shares, Aranda Investments (Mauritius), a Temasek entity, with just over 1.1 crore shares, and Bank of Baroda. Retail investors buying into this IPO are effectively buying out large institutional and sovereign-linked stakeholders, not funding NSE's growth.

Price band fight brewing

LiveMint reports the market had been pricing an upper band between Rs 1,800 and Rs 2,100, but that expectation is now under pressure. NSE shares closed around Rs 2,050 in the unlisted market on September 7, and the mandatory six-month lock-in for pre-IPO investors began the same day.

Arun Kejriwal, founder of Kejriwal Research and Investment Services, told LiveMint that the grey market premium of roughly Rs 300 on September 7 implies the official price band can't reasonably clear Rs 1,750, arguing 2,050 minus 300 sets the ceiling. He said pricing above that level would make the OFS look overvalued.

That grey market premium is already softening. LiveMint reported the unofficial premium fell to Rs 273 on September 8, down from Rs 285 the prior day, which market watchers attributed to weak broader trading on Dalal Street and the start of the lock-in period cooling speculative appetite. No official price band exists yet. Sebi has not confirmed the September 15 date, and NSE has issued no public calendar.

A hot year for going public, everywhere

NSE's push comes as IPO markets globally are unusually active. Willy Lee, principal at Neostellar Advisors, told the Epoch Times that U.S. IPOs have already raised $145.8 billion this year, topping the full-year 2021 total of $142.4 billion. Separately, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle raised a combined $255 billion in debt and equity through early June largely to fund AI infrastructure, more than double their combined 2025 total, Lee said.

That risk appetite has coincided with a broader U.S. business-formation surge. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, speaking at a Breitbart News economic event, pointed to Census Bureau data showing Americans filed 578,926 new business applications in July, up 8.1% from June and 23.4% year-over-year, the highest monthly total in a series dating to 2004. Bessent tied part of that acceleration to AI tools lowering startup costs. These are separate national trends, not causally linked to NSE's IPO, but they describe the same global backdrop of capital markets eager to price new listings even as, per the Epoch Times, momentum-stock performance in the U.S. has slumped roughly 9% since July amid rising bond yields.

The open question for NSE is simple: does the official price band land where Kejriwal's math says it must, below Rs 1,750, or does NSE test the market above the unlisted price? That answer arrives with the anchor book on September 17, one day before the public issue is scheduled to open.