PNB Housing Finance Sees Strong Demand For Rs 3,000-Crore Public Offer

Mumbai: Mortgage lender PNB Housing Finance Ltd's initial public offering of shares to raise as much as Rs 3,000 crore ($449 million) was oversubscribed on the last day of the sale, stock exchange data showed.

The IPO had received bids for 828 million shares, or 29.5 times the 28.08 million on offer, as of 1210 GMT (5:40 p.m. in India) on Thursday. The sale closes on Thursday.

PNB Housing Finance, 51 per cent owned by state-run Punjab National Bank, was selling new shares in a price range of Rs 750 to Rs 775 apiece.

Neither Punjab National Bank nor Carlyle Group, which owns 49 per cent of the mortgage lender, were selling any stake in the IPO.

The IPO is the second largest this year after private sector life insurer ICICI Prudential Life Insurance Co Ltd raised Rs 6,057 crore last month in the biggest domestic IPO in six years.

Kotak Investment Banking, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, JM Financial, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley were managing the IPO for PNB Housing.

Indian companies have raised $2.9 billion through IPOs in the first nine months of this year, a 171 per cent jump from a year earlier and the best run since 2010, according to data compiled by Thomson Reuters.

($1 = Rs 66.8850)