Foreign investors and promoters raise over $30 billion through block deals in 2024

Domestic and foreign equity holders have together sold shares worth over $30 billion through block deals in 2024, suggesting investor appetite for Indian equities remains intact despite foreign outflows and slowing earnings growth.

While British American Tobacco (BAT) offloaded part of its stake in ITC for about $2 billion in March this year, global investment firm Blackstone sold a 15% stake in Mphasis for about $810 million.

The deal was the third-largest after BAT’s sale of a 3.5% stake in ITC and Hoechst’s 60.4% stake sale in Sanofi Consumer Healthcare. In October 2024, Hoechst GmbH, which was one of the promoters of Sanofi Consumer Healthcare, had offloaded its entire stake for ₹6,927 crore.

Further, Wednesday saw Vodafone Group Plc announcing its intention to exit Indus Towers holdings by offloading the remaining 7.92 crore shares, repressing 3% of the total outstanding equity.

“The proceeds from the sale will be used firstly to repay Vodafone’s outstanding borrowings of $101 million to Vodafone’s existing lenders, secured against Vodafone’s Indian assets,” Vodafone Group Plc said in an exchange filing.

The last tranche of selling is happening after about six months. Earlier in June, Vodafone Group Plc subsidiaries had raised about $1.8 billion by selling shares in India’s Indus Towers.

Other large deals in 2024 include Singapore-based Singtel selling a 0.8% stake in Bharti Airtel, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC offloading IRB Infrastructure Trust shares for ₹5,884 crore and Adani Group promoter divesting nearly a 2.8% stake in Ambuja Cements for ₹4,250 crore.

While Finsider International Company, part of billionaire Anil Agarwal-led Vedanta Resources, sold nearly ₹6000 crore worth of shares of Vedanta in two blocks, Whirlpool Mauritius Ltd, a promoter entity of Whirlpool of India, sold as much as 24% in the local unit through a block deal for $451 million.

Interestingly, despite a 7% drop from the peak, the Nifty50 still commands a premium valuation over its emerging market peers. At 24,467 points, the benchmark Nifty50 trades at 20.4 times its one-year forward earnings. That compares with 8.3x for South Korea and 13x for China, Bloomberg data show.