Granthara01.02.01IPO, FPO, private placement and QIP0%

IPO and issue rules change, and every issue has its own terms. Nothing here is a view on whether to apply to any offer.

01.02.01 · IPO, FPO, private placement and QIP

You have bought shares of Bharat Foods. You have never once bought them from Bharat Foods. Those are two different markets, and almost every beginner has only ever used the second one.

Where shares are born

New shares are created in the primary market. You have probably never been there.

Part 01 · Where Shares Are Born and Where They Trade
  1. 01.02.01 IPO, FPO, private placement and QIP
  2. 01.02.02 Fresh issue vs offer for sale in an IPO
  3. 01.02.03 Why buying a share sends the company nothing
  4. 01.02.04 Listing, delisting and suspension
  5. 01.02.05 How to read an IPO prospectus
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Learn

Two markets, one word

The primary market is where shares are created and sold by the company itself. Money paid there goes into the business.

The secondary market is everything afterwards — investors trading existing shares with each other. That is the NSE and BSE screen you know, and it is where your ₹5,000 went.

A company raises money once, when it issues. After that it is a spectator to its own share price.

Learn

Four doors into the primary market

The four names below are not four different products. They are four answers to one question: who is allowed to buy this issue?

An IPO is open to the public because the company is not listed yet. An FPO is the same act, done by a company already listed. A private placement and a QIP skip the public entirely and sell to selected institutions, which is faster and far cheaper to run.

See it

Who sells, who buys, where the money lands

Tap each route. The company is only on the receiving end in some of them.

Notice what all four share: new shares exist afterwards that did not exist before.

Learn

What it costs the owners

Every rupee raised this way is paid for in ownership. Bharat Foods has one crore shares. Issue ten lakh more and there are one crore ten lakh — your ten shares are now a smaller fraction of the company than they were yesterday.

That is dilution, and it is not automatically bad. If the money buys a plant that doubles profits, a smaller slice of a bigger business is worth more. If it plugs a hole, you have simply been made smaller.

0.0001%your stake before the issue — arithmetic decides what it is after
Try it

A listed company raises ₹300 crore from six institutions in a week, with no public window. What was that?

Of the four, only one is likely to ever land in front of you as a decision, and it is the one with the most noise around it.

Before you read this, which was true?

Remember

New shares are created in the primary market and paid for in ownership. Everything you do on the exchange screen happens somewhere else entirely.

Next
01.02.02 — Fresh issue vs offer for sale in an IPO

An IPO is described as a company raising money. Often, a large part of it is not that at all.