In August 1602, a maid named Neeltgen Cornelis invested 100 guilders, saved on wages of 50 cents a day, in the Dutch East India Company, a venture that sent ships across the Indian Ocean to trade in nutmeg, mace and cloves. She was among 1,143 people to participate in what historians recognise as the world’s first initial public offering. The company’s charter had declared that any resident of the Dutch lands could buy shares, with no minimum or maximum investment. That principle, of universalised access to ownership in a productive enterprise, is what every IPO since has inherited, and what India, four centuries later, has taken further than any country on earth.
In 2025, India produced 367 new listings, accounting for 28.4 per cent of all IPO activity globally, more than the US, China, and Hong Kong. India’s arrival at this position required decades of institutional building. In 1991, facing a balance of payments crisis, the government dismantled the License Raj and opened the economy to market forces. What the 1991 reforms also did, unintentionally, was create a new dependency. India’s capital markets became driven by foreign institutional investors who would pile in and drive share prices up. When that foreign liquidity was inevitably withdrawn and deployed elsewhere, IPO activity would cease. In their 2002 paper IPO Market Cycles: Booms and Busts in New Issues Activity, economists Michelle Lowry and G William Schwert showed that IPO waves sustain themselves through the information each successful listing generates for the next company in line. India ran this cycle repeatedly through the 1990s and 2000s.
The structural shift of the past decade has changed the source of the fuel. The share of domestic investments in Indian listings reached nearly 75 per cent in 2025, the highest for any year. India’s GDP has grown at one of the fastest rates of any large economy. A middle class that did not meaningfully exist in 1991 now drives consumption and savings in equal measure. Global companies are rushing to list their local business units in India, lured by a valuation premium.
Of the 367 listings in 2025, 270 came from small and medium enterprises. IPO fundraising accounts for 49 per cent of all private capital exits in India, against 9 per cent in the US and 13 per cent in Europe.
Sometime in the coming months, Reliance Industries is expected to file paperwork to bring Reliance Jio public. The offering would be the largest in Indian history. Analysts have been cautious about predicting the listing’s reception, but broadly agree that the pipeline it represents reflects a market built on stronger foundations than any previous cycle.
The Dutch East India Company’s voyages to the Indian Ocean were about extracting value from the subcontinent. India’s IPO market, four centuries later, is about distributing it.