Eight IPOs and ₹11,000 Cr in one week: reading the October calendar

Eight companies come to the primary market this week, looking for about ₹11,000 Cr between them. Four of them open on the same day, 15 October, and close on 19 October.

The four big books

• Zetwerk Manufacturing Businesses: ₹5,012 Cr at ₹143–151 a share, of which ₹2,830 Cr is fresh issue and ₹2,182 Cr offer for sale.
• Bonfiglioli Transmissions: ₹2,534 Cr at ₹558–586, entirely an offer for sale by the Italian promoter.
• Tonbo Imaging India: ₹852 Cr at ₹665–700, entirely an offer for sale.
• Sahajanand Medical Technologies: ₹475 Cr at ₹327–344, an offer for sale by existing shareholders.

Who gets the money

Of the four, only Zetwerk raises fresh capital, and even there more than four rupees in ten go to sellers. That is the pattern of the year: in September, about three-quarters of the ₹39,380 Cr raised through main-board IPOs was offer for sale. An IPO is often the exit for earlier investors, not the company's first serious raise.

Why it matters to a family office

The price at which an early investor exits in an IPO is, in effect, the ceiling on what a pre-IPO buyer earlier in that company's life could make. When a book is mostly offer for sale, the question to ask is what the sellers paid, and when. The best-placed money in these books came in before anyone was marketing them.

That is the round the desk looks for: profitable companies raising their first real outside equity, a year or more before a banker builds the book, at a price set against listed peers rather than against the excitement of a listing week.

Behind the four headline issues, SEBI has also cleared Shellz India for an IPO of 40 lakh fresh shares, to repay debt and fund working capital, and Udaan has said it is aiming to list by early 2028. The pipeline is deep; over 200 companies are waiting for regulatory clearance.