Mumbai, Jan 14, 2026, 01:09 IST
- Bharat Coking Coal’s IPO closed with demand running about 147 times the shares on offer, exchange data showed
- Grey market premium hovered near ₹11, an unofficial indicator, implying a listing near ₹34 versus the ₹23 cap price
- A Jan. 15 trading halt and settlement holiday could delay the tentative listing timetable
Bharat Coking Coal’s initial public offering closed in India on Tuesday with demand running about 147 times the shares on offer, exchange data showed. The grey market premium (GMP) — an unofficial price paid in off-market deals before listing — was around ₹11, implying a debut near ₹34 versus the top issue price of ₹23.
The scramble comes despite choppy trading in domestic stocks, and it is a sharp test of risk appetite early in 2026. Bids topped ₹1.1 lakh crore (₹1.1 trillion) for the ₹1,071-crore issue, with applications crossing 90 lakh, exchange data cited by the Economic Times showed. “Scarcity value” and a “monopolistic position” in prime coking coal are pulling investors in, Gaurav Garg, a research analyst at Lemonn Markets Desk, wrote. The Economic Times
Attention now shifts to the listing timetable. A trading holiday and settlement halt on Jan. 15 could delay refunds and share credits and push the tentative debut beyond Jan. 16, with no official update yet on a revised schedule, the Economic Times reported.
At the top of the price band, investors bid for about 50.9 billion shares, dwarfing the 34.69 crore shares on offer, exchange data showed. In sheer application count, the deal set a new record, edging past Waaree Energies’ late-2024 tally.
Institutional buyers drove the book on the final day, with the qualified institutional buyer category subscribed roughly 311 times. Non-institutional investors bid about 258 times their quota, while retail investors subscribed about 49 times, according to the data.
Bharat Coking Coal, a unit of state-run Coal India, is India’s largest producer of coking coal — the grade used to make steel. Offer documents put its coking coal reserves at about 7.91 billion tonnes as of April 2024, around 21.5% of the country’s total.
The company runs 34 mines across Jharkhand and West Bengal and accounted for about 58.5% of India’s domestic coking coal output in FY25. It is also expanding coal washeries — plants that clean coal to a higher grade — as it tries to lift product mix over time.
Brokerage Anand Rathi Research said the IPO was fairly valued at about 8.64 times price-to-earnings (P/E), a common metric that compares price to annual profit, at the top end of the band. SBI Securities also pointed to an EV/EBITDA multiple of about 6.4 times — a yardstick comparing the firm’s total value to operating earnings — and recommended subscribing, the Times of India reported.
But the deal is a 100% offer for sale, meaning the proceeds go to Coal India rather than the operating company. That leaves execution on existing expansion plans doing most of the work, and the grey market signal can fade fast once trading starts.
Bharat Coking Coal raised about ₹273 crore from anchor investors ahead of the offer, with allocations including Life Insurance Corporation of India and Societe Generale, Mint reported. The basis of allotment is due on Jan. 14, with shares expected to list soon after, depending on the holiday-related clearing timetable.
