Business News at 09:30 am on 23rd November 2023

Let’s begin. Investors made a beeline for Tata Technologies’ Initial Public Offering on Wednesday, the first day of subscription, with the issue being fully subscribed within the first hour. The Rs 3,042-crore IPO — the first public issue of a Tata group firm in over 20 years — saw a subscription of 6.54x on the first day. The price band for the offer, which closes on November 24, has been fixed at Rs 475-500 a share. The retail portion saw bids of 5.42x, while the segment set aside for non-institutional investors was booked 11.69x. The qualified institutional buyers or QIB portion was subscribed 4.08x, according to consolidated data with the exchanges. On Tuesday, the company had raised raised Rs 791 crore from anchor investors.
Hit by a dearth of big-ticket deals, India’s merger and acquisition activities fell 6.24 times to $14.58 billion in calendar year 2023, its lowest in the past 12 years. While geopolitical developments have played their part, the deal-making scenario continues to be restrained for the rest of the year. In comparison, the deal size for the entire 12-month period of 2022 — across domestic, inbound and outbound — stood at $91.45 billion, according to data collated by advisory firm Grant Thornton Bharat. Shanthi Vijetha, partner at Grant Thornton Bharat, told FE, quote, “This year is poised for a substantial decline in deal values compared with 2022, mainly due to the absence of multibillion-dollar transactions of previous year, which were collectively valued at a staggering $68.2 billion,” unquote.
Meanwhile, Coal India registered an increase of 13.6 per cent in its coal dispatches through Railways by transporting 31.48 million tonne of coal in October, as per the data provided by the coal ministry. The offtake was up by 7.2 per cent from September. The share of coal transportation through roadways and MGR (Merry-go-Round) remained low at 20.82 million tonne and 8.37 million tonne, respectively. Further, the company ran almost 258 rakes per day to supply coal to the power sector as against 237.5 rakes in October last year. Movement of rakes per day to all the sectors, including steel and cement, among others, came to be at 278 compared with 246 in the same period a year ago.
Moving on. RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das said on Wednesday that the recent stricter guidelines on unsecured lending were preemptive measures aimed at sustainability. He said, quote, “At a time when banks and non-banking finance companies are posting robust credit growth, they must ensure that at overall sectoral and sub-sectoral levels, the credit growth remains sustainable and all forms of exuberance are avoided,” unquote. He also cautioned both banks and non-banking financial institutions that the expansion of the credit portfolio itself and pricing of the same should be in sync with the risks envisaged, and both also need to further strengthen their asset liability management.
On to money matters. Credit card spends rose 38.3% year-on-year to an all-time high of Rs 1.8 trillion in October aided by strong festival season spends. The 38.3 per cent y-o-y growth witnessed in October was the highest in nine months. Spends rose 25.4% month-on-month, which is the highest in two years. Spend per card rose nearly 16 per cent y-o-y to an all-time high of Rs 18,898 in October. It rose 23.2 per cent month-on-month. BankBazaar.com Chief Executive Officer Adhil Shetty said quote, “We have seen two big use cases. Around 65% of credit card spends occur online. The ticket sizes online tend to be much higher than the average,” unquote. He added that features like no-cost EMI have also gained traction in recent times.
Next up industry. Startup unicorns PB Fintech, which runs Policybazaar and Paisabazaar, Tata Group-owned Big Basket, and Faaso’s owner Rebel Foods are among the top recruiters this year, according to data from market intelligence platform Private Circle. The data tracked 111 Indian unicorns from the top six cities between September 2022 to July 2023 – a period that did not add any new unicorns – and found that employee headcount during this period increased by 12,765 to 442,714 people in July. The research form said that hiring at unicorn startups seems to have picked up from April 2023, steadily jumping to 43,361 hired employees in July 2023.
Lastly, let’s look at the stocks in focus. These include ICICI Bank, Adani Enterprises, TVS Motor Company, and Honasa Consumer among others. Markets exhibited some volatility in early trades and turned range bound with a positive bias for the rest of the trading session. TVS Motor Company which operates in the two and three-wheeler segments enters Vietnam in collaboration with Minh Long Motors – its distribution partner, the company said in a regulatory filing. On the other hand, State-owned Power Grid Corp board on Wednesday approved a proposal to invest about Rs 367 crore in electricity transmission projects.