YES Bank share offering succeeds, 2nd time around

YES Bank has succeeded on its second attempt to raise capital, as friendlier conditions in financial markets allowed the Indian lender to put last year’s failed share offering behind it.

The Mumbai-based bank, led by billionaire Chief Executive Officer Rana Kapoor, raised about $750 million through the sale of new shares at ~1,500 each, an exchange filing late Wednesday showed. The decision to reduce the size of the sale helped smooth the deal, six months after Kapoor blamed a misunderstanding by his bankers for the failure of a $1 billion offering.

“Cutting the quantum of the share sale amount by one fourth, and risk-on mode in the global capital markets helped the bank,” said Siddharth Purohit, a Mumbaibased analyst at Angel Broking. The 32.7 million new YES Bank shares were offered at a 1.2 per cent discount to the closing price of ~1,518.60 last Thursday, the day the sale was launched.

The successful share offering will allow YES Bank to continue the rapid recent expansion of its loan book, the fastest among Indian lenders. Analysts at Deutsche Bank AG had warned in January that, in the absence of a capital raising, the bank would need to cut the pace of credit growth by about a third.

The latest offering was helped by more welcoming conditions in Indian financial markets after Prime Minister Narendra Modi's sweeping electoral win earlier this month in the state of Uttar Pradesh. At the same time, investors have been more willing to take on risk in emerging markets like India after Donald Trump’s November US election victory.

Another difference with last year's capital raising was the much-truncated list of banks arranging the offering, and the substitution of Goldman Sachs Group Inc with Bank of America Corp. After last year’s capital raising fell apart, YES Bank cited the banks’ “misinterpretation” of new rules for so-called qualified institutional placements as a reason for the decision to abandon the offering. Goldman Sachs declined to comment.