CarTradeslips 1.1% on trading debut, extends losses

CarTrade Tech Ltd, the operator of several automobile classifieds portals such as CarTrade, CarWale and BikeWale, listed its shares on stock exchanges at a slight discount to its issue price.

The company’s shares started trading at Rs 1,600 apiece on the BSE, down 1.1% from the initial public offering price of Rs 1,618. The shares fell to a low of Rs 1,476 apiece in the first few minutes before recovering the losses.

The shares were trading around Rs 1,570 apiece at 11:10 AM, when the benchmark Sensex was 0.74% down.

Navi Mumbai-based CarTrade is the second major new-age technology company to go public after food delivery company Zomato. However, Zomato had listed with a bang with its shares jumping 66% on debut.

CarTrade’s market capitalisation is currently around Rs 7,150 crore. That’s below the valuation of a little over Rs 7,400 crore (almost $1 billion) that it had targeted via the IPO.

The muted debut comes despite CarTrade receiving a strong response to its IPO. The offering was covered 20.3 times earlier this month, despite a not-so-enthusiastic response from retail investors.

Institutional investors had bid for 35.5 times the quota reserved for them while non-institutional investors’ portion was covered 41 times. Retail investors bid for only 2.75 times the shares set aside for them.

The total IPO size was Rs 3,000crore ($403 million). This was solely a share sale by the company’s investors including Warburg Pincus, Temasek, JP Morgan and March Capital. CarTrade didn’t raise any fresh capital for its own use.

The company owns and runs portals such as CarWale, CarTrade, Shriram Automall, BikeWale, CarTrade Exchange, Adroit Auto and AutoBiz to let customers, dealerships and auto manufacturers to buy and sell vehicles.