How India became the world's most prolific IPO market
In 2025, India produced 367 new listings, accounting for 28.4 per cent of all IPO activity globally, more than the US, China, and Hong Kong
You can also read our article in The New Indian Express newspaper.
In August 1602, a maid named Neeltgen Cornelis invested 100 guilders, saved on wages of 50 cents a day, in the Dutch East India Company, a venture that sent ships across the Indian Ocean to trade in nutmeg, mace and cloves. She was among 1,143 people to participate in what historians recognize as the world’s first initial public offering. The company’s charter had declared that any resident of the Dutch lands could buy shares, with no minimum or maximum investment. That principle, of universalized access to ownership in a productive enterprise, is what every IPO since has inherited, and what India, four centuries later, has taken further than any country on earth.
In 2025, India produced 367 new listings, accounting for 28.4% of all IPO activity globally, more than the United States, China, and Hong Kong by deal count. India’s arrival at this position required decades of institutional building. In 1991, facing a balance of payments crisis, the government dismantled the License Raj and opened the economy to market forces. Capital markets were reformed, SEBI was formally empowered as a market regulator, the National Stock Exchange was established, and foreign institutional investors were allowed to participate in Indian equity markets.
What the 1991 reforms also did, unintentionally, was create a new dependency. India’s capital markets became driven by foreign institutional investors who would pile in and drive share prices up, resulting in multiple IPOs taking place. When that foreign liquidity was inevitably withdrawn and deployed elsewhere, IPO activity would cease. In their 2002 paper “IPO Market Cycles: Booms and Busts in New Issues Activity,” economists Michelle Lowry and G. William Schwert showed that IPO waves sustain themselves through the information each successful listing generates for the next company in line. India ran this cycle repeatedly through the 1990s and 2000s, each boom imported on foreign capital, each correction arriving when that capital left.
The structural shift of the past decade has changed the source of the fuel. The share of domestic investments in Indian listings reached nearly 75% in 2025, the highest for any year in which proceeds exceeded one trillion rupees. India’s GDP has grown at one of the fastest rates of any large economy. Its manufacturing base is expanding as global companies diversify supply chains away from China. A middle class that did not meaningfully exist in 1991 now drives consumption and savings in equal measure. Global companies are rushing to list their local business units in India, lured by a valuation premium.
Of the 367 listings in 2025, 270 came from small and medium enterprises, a category of companies that has almost no equivalent IPO pathway in comparable markets. IPO fundraising accounts for 49% of all private capital exits in India, against 9% in the United States and 13% in Europe. The public market is load-bearing in India’s economy in a way it has never been required to be in countries with deep private equity and venture capital ecosystems.
Sometime in the coming months, Reliance Industries is expected to file paperwork to bring Reliance Jio public. Investment bankers have estimated Jio’s valuation between $130 billion and $170 billion. The offering would be the largest in Indian history. It would be absorbed almost entirely by a domestic investor base that in 1991 was largely locked out of the markets it is now expected to anchor. Analysts have been cautious about predicting the listing’s reception, but broadly agree that the pipeline it represents reflects a market built on stronger foundations than any previous cycle.
Neeltgen Cornelis, the maid who invested her savings in a company headed to the Indian Ocean, could not have imagined that the country at the end of that voyage would one day lead the world in the financial instrument she helped inaugurate. The Dutch East India Company’s voyages to the Indian Ocean were about extracting value from the subcontinent. India’s IPO market, four centuries later, is about distributing it.