'We are at the healthy beginning of a IPO cycle in India'

Corporate India has often been praised by investors for maintaining a stronger cash position and for being debt-free, Subhrajit Roy, managing director and head of global capital markets, Bank of America, said in an interview. He anticipates an acceleration in capital markets activity in 2024, in view of the deleveraging of corporate balance sheets and restarting of the capex cycle. Edited excerpts:

- Sneha Shah

2023 has been a pretty good year for the capital markets. How do you see it?

2023 has been interesting and the activity has been in phases. The first four months were pretty quiet. Come May, and we see a broader risk appetite where block deals led the way. To be fair blocks have been resilient throughout the last couple of years, irrespective of the market condition. Every quarter it averaged $2.5-3 billion. This year was unprecedented. We saw deals of maybe $5 billion being executed in April-June. This is, of course, because demand side has picked up and supply was reasonably stable. It was never zero, unlike let’s say, initial public offerings( IPOs) and follow-on public offers which saw these periods of no activity in recent times.

IPOs have come back strong recently with the Tata Technology listing seeing unprecedented demand. Will this continue into 2024?