Debasish Mishra, managing director and chief executive officer of SBI Funds Management Ltd., speaks at a news conference in Mumbai, India, on Thursday, July 9, 2026. The biggest shareholders in SBI Funds Management are aiming to raise up to 116.9 billion rupees ($1.22 billion) in what is expected to be India’s first billion-dollar IPO of the year. Photographer: Indranil Aditya/Bloomberg via Getty Images
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SBI Funds Management, India’s largest asset manager, made its stock market debut on Tuesday with shares listing at a 7% premium to the IPO price, a softer-than-expected start that fell short of hopes for a more emphatic opening.
The company’s $1 billion initial public offering had drawn heavy demand from investors. SBI Funds Management, a joint venture between State Bank of India and Europe’s Amundi Group, received bids totaling 2.97 trillion rupees ($30.7 billion), with the issue oversubscribed 41.6 times on the back of strong institutional interest.
The muted listing came as India’s IPO market continues to show signs of cooling from last year’s high-flying debuts. In the financial year ended March, Indian IPOs delivered an average listing premium of 8%, down sharply from 28% a year earlier, according to a May report by KPMG India. Market participants had been watching SBI Funds Management’s listing closely, as a stronger performance could have signaled deeper investor appetite for upcoming large public issues, including potential offerings from Jio Platforms and the National Stock Exchange.
India’s equity markets could see as much as $50 billion in stock offerings this year, although geopolitical uncertainty, including the continuation of the Iran war, remains a significant risk for investor sentiment.
“We should look forward to building a sustainable company which will drive this market going forward,” Olivier Mariée, head of Amundi’s international partner networks and joint ventures and a member of the SBI Funds board, said at a pre-listing event.
As of March, SBI Funds Management had 29.5 trillion rupees ($395 billion) in assets under management.
“Our aspiration is to be the fund manager to every Indian,” Debasish Mishra, managing director and chief executive of the firm, said at the event.
India has been the most prolific IPO market in the world over the last two years, with the highest number of listings, but activity was subdued here during the first half of the year.
Rising energy prices due to the Iran war have squeezed the Indian economy, taking the sheen off its domestic consumption story. That has coincided with a global investment rally in AI stocks, an industry where India has no major champions.
Since the start of the year, the Indian benchmark Sensex has lost over 9% and has been among the worst-performing large stock markets, while the Nifty 50 is down 7.5%.
