With a price band of Rs 308-324 per share fixed for the issue, the founders will together raise between Rs 101.22 crore and Rs 106.47 crore through this sale.
Prior to the public offering, the promoters held a 37.41% stake in the omnichannel retailer—and this is expected to fall to 35.34% following the issue.
Typically, promoters selling stakes in their companies is deemed to be a negative signal by markets and public investors. But explaining the rationale of the founders participating in the Rs 1,336-crore offer-for-sale (OFS) component of Honasa Consumer’s IPO, the company’s cofounder and CEO Varun Alagh told ET in an interview on Tuesday, “Around 97% of our ownership continues… so it’s not like we’re parting with something considerable. This was an event in which we also chose to generate some liquidity for ourselves”.
“Moving forward it would get even more difficult…if a promoter tries to sell later, it comes across as a negative signal. It is also to build confidence with our other selling shareholders. At one point, the OFS book wasn’t getting built because people wanted to hold on for longer and to build that, too, we had to put skin in the game,” he claimed.
On the second day of its public subscription, the issue was 61% subscribed as of 1.45pm. The retail portion of the offering, which is 10% of the total issue size, was subscribed 52%, while qualified institutional buyers (QIBs) placed bids for 91% of the shares on offer.
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Founder participation in new-age firms’ IPOsInterestingly, founders or promoters participating in the IPOs of their companies to sell stakes is not a new trend in new-age companies.
In the 2021 offering of financial services platform Paytm, founder and chief executive Vijay Shekhar Sharma sold shares worth over Rs 402 crore. Through the IPO, Paytm raised Rs 8,300 crore via a fresh issue of shares. Other than Sharma’s stake sale, the offering’s OFS component saw shares worth almost Rs 9,600 crore being sold by the company’s other shareholders.
Similarly, during the IPO of omnichannel beauty and fashion retailer Nykaa’s parent FSN E-commerce Ventures Ltd, its promoter entity, Sanjay Nayar Family Trust, sold 48 lakh shares worth Rs 540 crore.
Policybazaar founder Yashish Dahiya, and his relatives, and Alok Bansal parted with stakes worth Rs 58.5 crore in the PB Fintech IPO.
In the 2022 IPO of new-age logistics firm Delhivery, cofounders Kapil Bharati, Mohit Tandon and Suraj Sarahan had sold stakes worth Rs 51 crore.
Gurgaon-based food delivery company Zomato was the only outlier to this trend, with none of its founders or promoters selling any stakes during its IPO in July 2021.