Vodafone India plans to ring in $2.5 bn IPO in Aug, listing seen in Q4

Vodafone Group is likely to file a draft prospectus for the planned IPO of its Indian business in August with the listing expected in the fourth quarter, in a deal seen raising as much as $2.5 billion or Rs 16,812 crore, people with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters.

The British telecoms group, India’s largest mobile operator after Bharti Airtel, has begun work on the prospectus that would incorporate the Indian unit’s financials for the first half of the calendar year, they said.

Vodafone has mandated Bank of America Corp, India’s Kotak Investment Banking, UBS AG in April as global coordinators for the IPO, set to be India’s biggest stock market listing since 2010.

A London-based Vodafone spokesman declined to comment on the timeline, saying the potential India IPO was a “lengthy process” and no decision would be made until the company was at the end of it. Sources declined to be identified as the information is not public.

In November last year, Vodafone’s Chief Executive Vittorio Colao said in Barcelona that the Indian arm’s 42 percent holding in Indus Towers would also be included in the initial public offer.

“We’ll indeed look for options for the tower company itself, but the tower company stake is part of the IPO process,” he said then.

For the fiscal ending 2014-15, Vodafone India had reported a 12.6 percent jump in its total revenue at Rs 42,526 crore driven by strong customer additions and growth in data revenues. The company had reported a total revenue of Rs 37,777 crore in the previous financial year.

With inputs from Reuters