BSE ready for stake sale
Mumbai: India's premier bourse, the Bombay Stock Exchange is set to offload 51 per cent of its stake, both to a strategic partner as well as in the retail market through an IPO, and is currently awaiting market regulator Sebi's nod to make its move. According to unsubstantiated reports, international bourses such as Nasdaq and the NYSE have shown interest in BSE's stake.

According to Rajanikant Patel, CEO and MD, BSE, the bourse is currently in the process of selecting its strategic partner and hopes to complete the entire process by May 2007. Sebi is expected to prescribe criteria for selection of strategic partner and will be announcing these norms soon.

According to Patel, automatic approval already exists is already provided by the Reserve Bank of India for a foreign partner interested in a 26 per cent stake in an Indian financial institution.

It may be recalled that Nasdaq president and CEO Robert Greifeld had said last week that he was in favour of global consolidation of exchanges and had also held a meeting with BSE officials to possibly discuss picking stake in the exchange.

Kotak Mahindra, financial advisor for the bourses demutualisation process, has already selected eight leading global bourses for the stake sale.
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Reporting platform for corp. bonds to be ready soon: Sebi
Mumbai: Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) today said the reporting platform for the corporate bond will be ready in six months time.

Speaking at a seminar on the corporate debt market in India here today, T C Nair, whole time member of Sebi, said that trading in corporate bonds through an unified exchange would be set up by the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) and would start in six months time. He felt that the BSE should become a hub for the Asian market, in two years time.

The BSE has been given the mandate for forming the trading platform for an exchange traded bond market as well as for information reporting.

Currently, the Indian debt market attracts just 1% of GDP in investments as compared to 2% in China and 11% in Japan.
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Tech Mahindra IPO and GMR issues oversubscribed
Mumbai: The Tech Mahindra and GMR Infrastructure public issues, which closed on Friday, have met with an enthusiastic response. The IPO of Tech Mahindra Ltd, an IT solutions joint venture between Mahindra and Mahindra and British Telecom, was oversubscribed by 62.88 times, while the public issue of Hyderabad-based infrastructure major GMR was oversubscribed 6.47 times.

While the issues received significantly oversubscribed by institutional investors, the response from retail investors was however sluggish. It would appear that market sentiment is yet to recover from the sharp downslide it has experienced after hitting a life-time high of 12,671.11 on May 11.

GMR had fixed its IPO price band at Rs 210 to Rs 250 per share, while that of Tech Mahindra was fixed at Rs 315-365 per share.
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