LIC files DRHP; intends to list 5% equity via IPO

Life Insurance Corporation of India on Sunday filed the Draft Red Herring Prospectus (DRHP) with capital markets regulator SEBI.

The insurer is looking to sell the Centre's five per cent equity stake in the company via its upcoming IPO, the DRHP document showed.

The Centre aims to offload a total of 316 million equity shares to investors through the public offering of the 6.32 billion outstanding shares, the document showed.

The Centre wishes to conclude the IPO by the end of FY22 ending March 2022.

The current fiscal FY22's divestment target was revised to Rs 78,000 crore from the Budget estimates of Rs 1.75 lakh crore and the Centre would like to cash in the LIC IPO to meet its revised divestment estimate.

The IPO drive will have a 50 per cent reservation for Qualified Institutional Buyers (QIB), not 15 per cent for Non-Institutional Investors (NII), and 35 per cent reserved for retail investors.

Policy-holders along with employees of LIC will also have a quota reserved in the IPO, the document showed.

Besides, evidently to conclude the much awaited IPO, the Centre had recently extended the tenure of LIC's Chairperson M.R. Kumar and Managing Director Raj Kumar by one year. With the late extension, both the top officials of the insurer will now continue till March 2023.

Tuhin Kanta Pandey, Secretary, Department of Investment and Public Asset Management (DIPAM) in late January 2022, said: "We are very sanguine about bringing the LIC IPO in early March."

The listing of LIC is poised to be India's biggest IPO till date.

The embedded value of LIC, as on September 2021, was Rs 5.4 trillion, DIPAM said in a Twitter post.