NSE's listing is more than an IPO: It's celebration time for India's financial-market model
Jayanta Roy Chowdhury
New Delhi, Sep 24 (UNI) The National Stock Exchange of India's decade-long-awaited arrival on the public markets on Thursday saw the stock somersaulting to cross Rs 1850 a share within minutes of its debut, placing the market among the globe's ten top listed share bazaars with a share value of over Rs 456,000 crore. Much of the credit for the highly successful listing goes to Ashishkumar Chauhan, CEO of NSE, who now holds the record for being the country's only market administrator to have guided both the country's rival exchanges, NSE and BSE, to successful debuts on the public market.
"What is good for India is good for the NSE," Chauhan said at the listing ceremony at the BSE bourse in Mumbai, which he had previously led in a public listing 9 years back. Thursday's listing is being seen as India's second-largest listing to date. The largest listing in India has been Hyundai Motors' nearly Rs 30,000 crore debut in 2024. The NSE listing of an offer for sale of shares worth Rs 22,562 crore came after a decade of regulatory hurdles, legal complications and changing market conditions, with buyers coming mostly from institutional investors. "Institutional investors bid aggressively, while retail participation was less," said Vikram Sawhney, a Delhi-based trader. The NSE dominates Indian equity trading, with about 93 per cent of the cash-equity market and roughly three-quarters of options trading being routed through it.
The economics of this bourse, as a result, offers investors an unusually direct exposure to the expansion and regulation of India's capital markets. Chauhan's reputation for successfully adding value to financial structures precedes this listing, say marketmen to whom UNI spoke. Besides the successful NSE and BSE IPOs, he is credited with leading IPOs of NSDL, Protean eGov Tech, and CDSL. "With five big successes, he is now seen as a super-achiever," said Sawhney. The NSE chief executive's career has run through several of the defining institutions of India's modern capital markets.
An alumnus of IIM Calcutta, he was part of NSE's formative years, later became managing director and chief executive of BSE, and returned to NSE as its chief executive. NSE's own biography records his earlier roles at Reliance Industries, BSE, NSE and IDBI Bank. That history helps explain why Chauhan is increasingly viewed in Indian financial circles as a man with a "Midas touch" for turning institutional transformations into successful market events.
The exchange IPO has arrived at a moment when regulators are deliberately trying to cool the speculative excesses of India's derivatives boom. Derivatives, particularly options, have become an enormous source of NSE's revenue, while regulatory changes and declining trading volumes have forced investors to reconsider how durable that growth can be. NSE accounted for 99.79 per cent of Indian equity-futures turnover in financial year 2026, handling Rs 393.82 lakh crore out of an industry total of Rs 394.67 lakh crore.
This possibly explains why, despite major listing successes, the IPO could not go beyond the Rs 30,000 crore barrier. NSE came to market at Rs 1,785 a share, implying a valuation of about 43 times fiscal 2026 earnings. Its rival BSE, already listed since 2017, trades at about 47 times trailing earnings, though its overall valuation is about a third of NSE's. Marketmen said, "The bourses are actually being asked to value two things simultaneously. Firstly, the extraordinary profitability of the financialisation of India's bourses and the possibility that regulation will put brakes on one of its most lucrative engines."
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