India's largest stock exchange prepares to list

India's largest stock exchange, the National Stock Exchange (NSE), has filed for an initial public offering (IPO) that is expected to be among the country's largest listings this year, CNBC reported.

The initial public offering will be a full-blown sale, with many large investors, both domestic and foreign, reducing their stakes. India's largest public sector bank State Bank of India, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Singapore's Temasek are among the 10 investors selling stakes through the IPO.

Details of the IPO price and valuation were not disclosed in the filing with the Capital Markets Authority of India. It usually takes two to three months to get regulatory approval, according to market experts.

India is among the top 10 global capital markets, with a total market capitalization of about 474 trillion rupees ($5 trillion), and NSE is the largest stock exchange. It holds 93% of India's cash market and handles almost 100% of the country's stock futures trading and nearly 75% of its stock options trading, according to the IPO plan.

NSE, which has been trying to list since 2016, has more than 129 million registered unique investors.

NSE's much smaller Indian competitor, BSE, has a market capitalization of $17.2 billion and trades at a price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of 66 times over the past 12 months.

IPO activity in India has been subdued as investor appetite has waned amid the fallout from the Middle East conflict. Many major equity offerings have been put on hold, but with the Iran war showing signs of ending, IPO activity is picking up, the source said.

Reliance Jio Infocomm, the company of Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani, which is India's largest mobile phone operator, filed documents on Friday for an offering to sell up to 270 million shares.

With an estimated fundraising of over 600 billion rupees ($6.3 billion), the NSE and Reliance Jio IPOs could account for nearly a third of the total funds raised by 104 IPOs last year on India's main market, said Prashant Rao, director and head of capital markets at Anand Rathi Investment Banking.