52 India’s Financial Markets
as an American Depository Receipt (ADR) at NASDAQ in June 2000. Since
then, there have been a few such exits,
3
but these are not yet the norm in the
PE industry.
Of the three exit mechanisms, India has a rather unique IPO market
mechanism. The IPO market in India was one of the first that started using the
electronic book-building mechanism to list the equity shares of a new company.
We discuss this market mechanism next.
3.2 THE IPO MARKET
The Indian IPO market in the pre-reforms period was controlled by the Con-
troller of Capital Issues (CCI)—a department at the Ministry of Finance. The
firm would set the quantity of the issue to be raised. But the CCI would decide
at what price the shares would be issued. Typically, the