Book-Building Mechanism in India: The Built-in Inefficiencies

Banerjee Rachna ()
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Banerjee Rachna: Fortune Institute of International Business, Plot no. 6, Vasant Gaon, Nr. RR hospital, New Delhi, 110010, INDIA

Advances In Management, 2009, vol. 2, issue 11

Abstract: The price of any scrip depends upon investors’ perceptions about the company. To overcome the problem of high pricing, SEBI, in its series of measures to streamline the capital market, introduced the book-building concept in 1995, which was widely followed in markets in developed nations When book-building was introduced in India, the main objective was that book-building would help ‘discover’ the right price for a public issue which in turn would eliminate unreasonable issue pricing by greedy promoters. This article analyzes the efficiency of the book building mechanism which is adopted by issuers for pricing of IPOs in India. There are reasons to believe that the current book-building system is not really efficient. An analysis of IPO issue prices and their market prices shows that there is a considerable difference between them. Further, in most of the IPOs, the market prices are trading way below their issue prices which indicate that book building is not an efficient mechanism of price discovery. Besides, in the current system, investors have an illusion of discovering the price. That is not true because the underwriting entities have already estimated a price band for the stock in consultation with other stakeholders to the issue. The investor’s options are severely circumscribed. The book building method is heavily tilted against the retail investors’ right from the run-up to determine the pricing to the allocation quota. Our observation is that the current system of book building is neither realistic nor reflects investor sentiment towards an IPO.

Date: 2009

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