Boss packs ₹1,000cr punch in ₹8cr IPO

MUMBAI: Another day, another SME is making waves on IPO street.
A week after an eight-employee two-wheeler dealer created buzz because its IPO was subscribed 400 times, another small & medium enterprise IPO that was subscribed over 100 times has surprised the street because pictures of its supposed office in a dilapidated structure surfaced online.
Boss Packaging Solutions, a small company from Gujarat, which looked to raise Rs 8 crore, saw its IPO subscribed 127 times, translating to a demand size of over Rs 1,000 crore.
The social media buzz prompted Sebi and NSE officials to reconfirm the company's antecedents with the merchant banker. "Officials have done on-ground inspection of the company's factories and offices, and given their go-ahead to list," a source familiar with the IPO said. "The company is a functional one but nothing fancy."
While social media users allege manipulation in SME IPOs that are attracting huge investor interest, market players said that may not be entirely true. It's the liquidity available in the market and the FOMO factor that are leading to such high oversubscriptions in SME IPOs, a merchant banker active in the SME space told TOI.
Boss Packaging's IPO is being handled by Fedex Securities, a city-based merchant banking firm, the offer's prospectus showed. In its IPO, Boss Packaging offered about 12.7 lakh shares at a fixed price of Rs 66 per share. At the end of the three-day bidding period on Sept 3, the total demand for its shares was at nearly 16.3 crore. Since then, its grey market premium (GMP) has fluctuated between Rs 12 and Rs 5. GMP is the expected gain on listing from speculators in the unofficial trading segments of the market offered to interested investors.
Some social media accounts shared screenshots from Google Maps that showed the company's location at a dilapidated structure. One of the sources TOI spoke to clarified that the Google Maps picture was of one of the company's old units. "It has multiple units for fabrication, manufacturing and assembly."