Coal India Limited (CIL) is an Indian state-owned coal company headquartered in Kolkata, West Bengal, India and the world’s largest coal miner with revenue exceeding Rs 45,797 Cr or $10.3 billion U.S. (FY2008-09). It is owned entirely by the Union Government of India, under the administrative control of the Ministry of Coal.
Coal India Ltd.: Reuters graphic/ Christine Chan
As part of its divestment programme to raise about 9 Billion$, the Government of India has put up 10% of Coal India Ltd. in an IPO conducted this week. If priced at the top of its 225-245 rupee price range, the IPO would swell Government coffers by about 3.5 Billion$ and Coal India would have a market value of $35 billion, ranking it seventh among listed Indian firms. As the Economic Times puts it “The response to the Coal India (CIL) initial public offering (IPO) that finally closed early Friday morning, after lead managers were forced to extend the time limit to deal with a deluge of applications, has been phenomenal. Against the issue amount of Rs 150 billion, bids came in for Rs 2.54 trillion and the final total could be higher.
While retail investors seem to have been relatively circumspect — the retail portion was over-subscribed only 2.32 times — and employees even more so — the employee portion was not fully subscribed — both institutional and highnet-worth buyers seem to have participated with gusto.”
Open cast coal mine in India: Image via Wikipedia
While a portion of the shares were held for employees the mining unions discouraged their members from applying. But with the opening price when the shares list on November 4th expected to be around Rs 300 – 320 there is a backlash among the union members who are going to have lost out. The institutional portion was oversubscribed 25 times.
Coal India has reserves of about 277 billion tonnes of which around 60 billions tonnes are currently recoverable by open cast mining. Current annual production is about 400 million tonnes and expected to rise to about 650 million tonnes in 5 years. India currently imports about 100 million tonnes of high grade coal mainly for steel making. Coal India has a major investment programme ongoing for the installation of coal washeries to improve the notoriously poor quality (high levels of abrasive ash) of Indian coals. Most Indian coals have very low values of Sulphur content so that sulphur dioxide emission is not a major concern.
The enormous interest of the institutional investors – both from within and from outside India – is a healthy indicator that simple business considerations rather than pseudo-environmentalism is still the governing factor.
The k2p blog 
November 4, 2010 at 11:09 am
[…] IPO where the Government of India divested 10% of its shares in the worlds largest coal producer was massively oversubscribed. The share price was set at 245 Rs and the top of its offer range of 225 – 245 […]