By Aditya Kalra and Aditi Shah
NEW DELHI (Reuters) -SoftBank-backed Indian e-scooter maker Ola Electric said on Monday it would offer shares priced in a range from 72 rupees to 76 rupees ($0.86-$0.91) in a $734-million listing that will be this year’s biggest domestic IPO.
It is the first IPO by an Indian electric vehicle maker, which is also the biggest player in a country where adoption of clean vehicles is still low, but rising rapidly.
“Tesla is for the West and Ola for the rest,” has become a catchphrase best linked with the firm’s chairman, Bhavish Aggarwal, who is betting big on cleaner vehicles, after having often publicly criticised gasoline and diesel vehicles.
A term sheet showed the IPO, which will run from Aug. 1 to Aug. 6, puts a value of $4 billion on the company, which sold its first scooter in 2021.
That valuation is about 25% lower than Ola’s last funding round in September, led by Singapore’s investment firm Temasek which valued the EV maker at $5.4 billion.
The lower figure stems from a correction in the valuation of global tech companies, while Ola also wants to attract participants to the stock offering, said sources who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The IPO is set to draw investor bids from Fidelity, Nomura and Norges Bank, as well as several Indian mutual funds.
In the IPO, Ola will issue new shares to raise $657 million while existing investors offload their stake of about $77 million to IPO investors, the term sheet showed.
The company unveiled the price band in an advertisement in the Financial Express newspaper, with a discount of 7 rupeesa share for some eligible employees.
Aggarwal and investors such as SoftBank and Matrix Partners will sell part of their stakes in the IPO.
The newspaper ad showed 10% of the IPO is to be reserved for retail investors, with proceeds going to fund capital expenditure and research and development efforts.
(Reporting by Aditya Kalra and Aditi Shah; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne and Clarence Fernandez)
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