In Mumbai’s sleek skyscrapers, harried bankers race the clock to appraise a company that hasn’t been valued in decades. Bureaucrats burn the midnight oil in New Delhi, working through power cuts to pull together an initial public offering to rival any in Asia this year. And across the hinterland, front-page newspaper ads alert more than 250 million policy holders of the chance to own a piece of a company nearly as old as post-independence India.
For almost two years, India has steeled itself for a gargantuan task: readying the country’s premier insurer — with nearly $500 billion in assets and a valuation estimated as high as $203 billion — for what could become its biggest-ever stock listing. Some bankers have described the public offering of Life Insurance Corp. of India, or LIC , as India’s Aramco moment. As with the Gulf oil giant’s $29.4 billion listing, the world’s largest, LIC’s debut will test the depth of the nation’s capital markets and global appetite for its state-owned crown jewel.
Success is far from assured. With about two months to the targeted launch, consultants have been pouring over reams of policy documents to come up with LIC’s embedded worth — a key valuation metric. Bankers say global investors worry about the autonomy of an institution regularly pressed into service to rescue teetering banks and floundering state assets. Local investors are skeptical the 65-year-old firm can compete against up-and-comers.
A knock-out listing could see LIC raise as much as $10 billion from the IPO with a minimum dilution of 5%. That would make it the third biggest globally involving an insurer. More importantly, it would burnish Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s reputation as a market-oriented reformer ahead of key state elections and help plug a gaping budget deficit.
“If the listing happens, it could change the global image of India,” said James Beeland Rogers, who’s been investing in emerging markets for a few decades and is the chairman of Beeland Interests Inc. and Rogers Holdings.
Sizing up a Giant
LIC is a household name in India. With 2,000 branches, more than 100,000 employees and 286 million policies, the Mumbai-headquartered company reaches practically every corner of the country. The sheer size of LIC lays bare the challenges of listing what is effectively a black box.
The insurer releases its balance sheet only once a year, meaning there are no publicly available numbers to discern its embedded value, which combines the current value of future profits with the net value of assets. Milliman and Ernst & Young executives overseeing the valuation must sift through piles of policies to account for parameters as wide-ranging as mortalities, morbidities, lapses and surrenders. lic ipo Comparisons with peers are tricky. LIC, which was founded in 1956, follows rules set by a unique parliamentary act rather than the law that governs the nation’s other insurance firms. In March 2020, LIC’s property holdings were internally valued at about $5.8 billion, according to a person with knowledge of the matter, though it’s unclear whether all of this was adjusted to current market rates.
LIC plans to file the draft IPO prospectus in the final week of January, which will provide the embedded value as well as the number of shares for sale, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
“The due internal valuation, which is required to be done you would presume by a company of that size almost annually, hasn’t been done,” Nirmala Sitharaman, India’s finance minister, said in an October interview with Bloomberg. “The essentials of keeping valuations prim and proper — and the efforts that are required to keep them valuated appropriately — are all being done now.”
Sitharaman has set a March deadline for the listing. If investors agree with the $203 billion valuation sought by the government, LIC would compete against India’s biggest companies — Reliance Industries Ltd. and Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. The IPO would account for the bulk of a $23.5 billion asset-sale target needed to plug India’s widening budget deficit, which is forecast to be 6.8% this year.
LIC declined to comment.
Investors Want Answers
Another challenge is convincing foreign investors that LIC will deliver for them.
Ten bankers managing the listing spoke with almost all large funds that could be interested in buying shares, including GIC Re, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Blackrock Inc. and Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, according to people familiar with the matter.
Many of Mumbai’s globe-trotting investors wanted to know whether LIC would have greater autonomy from India’s government after the listing. They were initially skeptical, the people said, […]
source Inside the all-out campaign to prepare India’s biggest-ever IPO
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