India’s Great IPO Rush: How Much Is Too Much?

The Morning Brief

The episode explores the unprecedented acceleration of India's IPO market in 2026, noting a massive surge in volume during the July-September quarter compared to

Key takeaways

• The July-September 2026 period saw 61 IPOs worth approximately ₹88,000 crore, a significant jump from earlier in the year.
• The NSE IPO was highly successful among institutional and HNI investors, achieving a 5.7x subscription rate.

Main topics

• Indian IPO Market Trends
• NSE IPO Subscription Analysis

Notable quotes

India's IPO market seems to have suddenly found an accelerator.

Conclusion

The Indian capital market is entering a period of massive expansion wi

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:02) you Speaker 1 (0:06) This is the kind of IPO pipeline that we are talking about. 10 to 15 IPOs on average hitting the market every week. That is huge. India's Speaker 2 (0:16) IPO market seems to have suddenly found an accelerator. Look at the first six months of 2026. Between January and June, just 27 main board IPOs came to market, raising about Rs 22,572 crore. The month of May, in fact, saw no IPOs. And then July happened. 12 IPOs raised 28,648 crore in July. Another 23 raised 22,453 crore in August. And September is on course for 26 issues worth more than 37,000 crore rupees. Put together, The period between July and September alone accounts for 61 IPOs worth roughly Rs.88,000 crore. That's three months of IPOs worth more than four times the last six months. And the big beasts are arriving as well. The NSE IPO just happened and now investors are all set for the Jio Platforms IPO, which is doubted to be India's biggest public markets debut. So, in a nutshell, Indian IPOs this year have raised about 1.1 lakh crore rupees. This compares to a record-setting number of 1.76 lakh crore rupees last year, which was higher than 1.60 lakh crore rupees in 2024. The question is, can 2026 beat last year's number? Also, are the Indian markets ready to absorb that much more paper? Because remember, a similar interesting trend is developing in the US. Private market giants like OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX have fueled a debate that such a flurry of huge listings can suck liquidity out of the secondary market. Is India looking at a similar problem with its own massive IPO pipeline? Also, what about the smaller, lesser-known IPOs? Is there appetite for that too? Or are the NSC and Jio IPOs actually masking a selective IPO market demand? And finally, are we looking at a sustainable primary markets boom that will bring back foreign investors into India? Or is this just companies rushing through a window that'll close as fast as it had opened? On the Morning Brief Decode, every Friday, we try to break down the week's biggest stories for you and for me, the consumer, the investor, and the stakeholder. In this edition of TMB Decode, I have with me ET's Markets Editor Nishant Vasudevan to make sense of India's great IPO rush. Listen on. It's Friday, the 25th of September. I'm Anirban Chaudhary. This is the Morning Brief. Speaker 1 (3:21) Hi Nishant, welcome to the podcast. Hi Anirban, thanks for having me here. Absolutely. Okay, Speaker 2 (3:27) IPO buzz, right? Lots of it happening in the last 3-4 months. But it was not always like this, especially since the beginning of the year. It did not seem like it would be a great IPO show. 2026 did not seem like that. What has changed? What is happening? Why the buzz? Speaker 1 (3:46) Yeah, so Anirban, it's the basic thing what happened from the start of the year, there was the war that happened, the West Asia war that happened. The investor confidence levels were quite low. Plus, the crude prices had gone up, FPI's were selling, they had, I mean, from the past two years, they've been selling, but they continued to sell. So things were not really looking very good. For a good primary market or an IPO market to do well, you need a steady or you need a stable secondary market. Now, that is not the case. What changed, what turned the corner was April, somewhere early April, when Trump said that there would be some kind of a conditional ceasefire. Now after that the market started bouncing across the board including India because India was most impacted by this West Asia war. The market started bouncing back. Most importantly what happened is that a lot of small and mid caps they started performing very well. Now that is the main catchment area of many retail investors and when they see a lot of mid and small cap stocks going up, their confidence also go up. So thanks to that the valuations also started going up, valuations of companies because of the rise in stock prices and that is how many of the companies, many of the promoters, they felt confident of tapping the primary market, the IPO market. and kind of they were more open to kind of selling the shares. That explains the entire buzz that we are seeing in the past three months in the IPO market. Got Speaker 2 (5:31) it. Vishant, let's come to the latest example, which is the NSE IPO, which has obviously been keeping you busy and your team. Speaker 1 (5:37) Yeah. Speaker 2 (5:38) It ended on September 21st. It was actually perhaps the biggest test of the primary markets. Absolutely. And it seems to have done well. It was fully subscribed. But then what do the subscription numbers tell you? What do they tell you about demand? Is it the usual distribution