5 Asian Legal Business | October 2024 Cover Story “In recent years, the headline story for India was the emergence of its IPO market on the global stage. In my view, we are now past that phase – going forward, market observers will take for granted India’s acceptance on the global stage and instead watch its development as an equal competitor to other global IPO markets, as well as track the strength of the Indian corporate pipeline.” — Amit Singh, Linklaters of practice leader for South India Vijay Parthasarathi and partner Vinay Sirohia to Trilegal. Large parts of their teams, while not moving directly with the lead partners, also found new homes. Partner Abhinav Kumar left to join Talwar Thakore & Associates, while Rohit Tiwari moved to SAM. With Lahoty leading the newly-build capital markets practice and industry leader Yash Ashar still at the firm, CAM maintains a business-as-usual demeanour, with a pipeline of IPO mandates leading into the coming year. “There is an increasing demand for capital markets lawyers in the Indian markets, particularly among tier two firms”, explains legal market recruitment expert Khushboo Luthra. Firms that have a large base of early-growth clients are looking to bulk up their capital market practices in order to offer listing services to these clients when they decide to go public, she explains. This includes making partners out of principal associates and counsels at Tier-1 firms to attract the country’s top talent to their firms. As the SME IPO market grows, smaller firms such as SNG & Partners and Fox & Mandal are getting into the act, building capital market capabilities to lead smaller IPOs. Firms including Economic Laws Practice, Talwar Thakore & Associates, Bharucha & Partners, Saraf and Partners, and Chandhiok & Mahajan have launched and bolstered their capital markets practices this year to get a larger chunk of the IPO pie. International law firms such as Linklaters, Latham & Watkins, Sidley Austin and Hogan Lovells have also been growing their capital markets groups they vie to be the top international advisors for bookrunning lead managers on Indian IPOs. While large Indian IPOs with strong foreign institutional investor interest engage two international counsel, smaller ones that are sold internationally usually make do with just one. International counsel are engaged to ensure compliance with U.S. securities laws which is necessary from a foreign institutional investor perspective, who will need to make appropriate disclosures to their regulators. “While Linklaters has been active in the India jurisdiction for several decades, the firm has a renewed focus on India in an effort to be at the leading edge of the country’s growth,” Singh says. “We have also recently hired a private equityfocussed partner to our Singapore office, whose clients have already sent us portfolio companies for IPO. In addition, at the associate level, we have made several hires, including lawyers with Indian educational or law firm backgrounds, to help us meet the very high demands for service that we are seeing,” Singh adds. Future outlook Despite the overwhelmingly positive trends, dealmakers and legal experts maintain a cautious outlook. Many anticipate a potential market correction and believe that the current IPO frenzy may not be sustainable in the long term. However, the prevailing sentiment among industry professionals is to capitalise on the current favourable conditions while they last. A big concern for experts remains the listing of lesspromising companies looking to take advantage of the bull market to access public finance through listings, a practice that has got SEBI working overtime to regulate. Despite concerns, strong regulatory scrutiny and a push towards retail investment is keeping India at the forefront of public listings in the coming year. Legal experts are seeing more companies in the technology, consumer, infrastructure, healthcare and real estate space looking at listings in 2025. “In recent years, the headline story for India was the emergence of its IPO market on the global stage. In my view, we are now past that phase – going forward, market observers will take for granted India’s acceptance on the global stage and instead watch its development as an equal competitor to other global IPO markets, as well as track the strength of the Indian corporate pipeline,” says Singh. Much of that depends in turn on macro and Indiaspecific economic policy and growth. For now, though, India and its IPO market has more momentum than we have seen in perhaps decades, and we expect that energy to continue into 2025,” Singh adds.
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