Second wave of dematerialisation takes off in unlisted companies

In the mid-1990s, when the shares of listed companies first began to be held in electronic form, they accounted for less than 1 percent of the stocks bought and sold on the stock exchanges.

- SACHIN P MAMPATTA

This climbed to 99.5 per cent by 2001.A similar second wave of dematerialisation is now taking place, this time for unlisted companies. This has been the factor in the number of issuers of demat securities rising from around 40,000 companies in 2022-23 (FY23) to more than 100,000 as of November 2025, according to the National Securities Depository Ltd (NSDL) data. Central Depository Services (India) Ltd (CDSL) has seen a similar doubling of issuers from around 20,000 to over 40,000.

The analysis is based on the Securities and Exchange Board of India’s recently released “Handbook of Statistics” with additional updated numbers compiled from disclosures by NSDL and CDSL.

A look at the instrument-wise numbers showed that the number of demat issuers in the listed equity space was up less than 10 per cent between FY23 and FY25.The number of unlisted equity issuers rose over 110 per cent in the same period, suggesting much of the growth has come from that area.