India’s biggest airline in initial share offering

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Indian budget airline IndiGo plans to conduct an initial share offering this week as it seeks to raise as much as 32.68bn rupees ($500m; £325.6m), according to reports.

The share offering would be India’s largest since 2012.

Owned by InterGlobe Aviation, IndiGo is the country’s largest domestic airline by market share.

The public offer is set to open today and close on 29 October.

It proposed to list on the Bombay Stock Exchange and the National Stock Exchange of India.

Global coordinators of the share sale include JP Morgan, Barclays and UBS, according to the firm’s preliminary prospectus filed in June.

The firm warned in its initial prospectus that there was “no assurance that the new routes which we expand into will be profitable or become profitable.”

IndiGo’s international destinations currently include Singapore, Dubai and Bangkok and consultancy firm Centre of Aviation (CAPA) said it has been the only consistently profitable carrier in the country for the past seven years.

IndiGo said it may not be able to successfully implement its planned expansion of its route network “due to factors beyond our control” – including economic, political and business conditions.

In August this year the budget airline finalized a deal with Airbus to buy 250 A320neo aircraft.

The deal followed a series of orders Indigo has placed with Airbus, as it continues to win a bigger share of India’s fast growing aviation market.

The agreement was Airbus’ single largest order by number of aircraft and was worth a $26.5bn (£17bn) at list prices.

IndiGo was founded in 2006 by travel entrepreneur Rahul Bhatia and Rakesh Gangwal, a former chief executive of US Airways.

Source: The Daily Star