The atrium inside the National Stock Exchange (NSE) building in Mumbai, India, on Wednesday, Sept. 9, 2026. NSE, the operator of the world’s largest derivatives exchange by trading volume, is seeking a valuation of as much as 5.26 trillion rupees ($55 billion) in its planned initial public offering, according to people familiar with the matter.
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The $2.3 billion initial public offer of shares in India’s National Stock Exchange has received a frenzied response from investors, drawing bids worth more than $10 billion despite its hefty price-to-earnings multiple, which values it above several U.S. stock exchange businesses such as Nasdaq.
Driven by strong demand from institutional and high-net-worth buyers, the NSE IPO secured bids for 505.81 million shares on Monday, 5.7 times the 88.64 million shares on offer.
As part of the IPO, the company also raised 67.5 billion rupees ($704 million) last week from anchor investors such as the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and India’s top life insurer Life Insurance Corporation of India.
The NSE IPO is the country’s biggest listing so far this year and the second largest ever after Hyundai Motor India’s share offer of $3.3 billion in 2024.
The offer has been one of the most anticipated large listings this year in India and has been in the works since 2016. The business offers investors a strong play on India’s broadening retail participation in capital markets.
According to the country’s economic survey released earlier this year, equity investments, which were once a limited part of household balance sheets, have become a “significant component of financial wealth.” The share of equity and mutual funds in annual household financial savings increased to 15.2% in the financial year ending March 2025 from 2% in the financial year ending March 2012, it said.
India is among the top 10 equity markets globally with a total market cap of around 492 trillion rupees ($5.1 trillion), and NSE is the main exchange. It commands a 93% share of India’s cash market and accounts for nearly 100% of the country’s equity futures trading, alongside 75% of equity options trading, according to the IPO filing.
NSE’s “asset-light business model enables consistently high margins and cash generation,” Indian brokerage Geojit Financial Services said in a report on Sept. 16, asking investors to subscribe to the IPO.
The report added that the growing capital market participation and “increasing financialization” in India provided NSE with “a strong long-term growth runway.”
NSE is valued at a price-to-earnings ratio of 42.9 times based on the upper end of the IPO price band and earnings per share for the year ended in March 2026, as per a report by Indian brokerage Yes Securities.
In contrast, stock exchange companies in the U.S., the world’s largest equity market, are trading at a price-to-earnings ratio of less than 24 times. Nasdaq trades at price-to-earnings of 23.6 times, while Intercontinental Exchange trades at 21.9 times, according to data from LSEG.
Earlier this year, Sundararaman Ramamurthy, the managing director of the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE), a competitor of the NSE, said that growing local investor participation had shielded the Indian markets from a freefall even as foreign investors exited in large numbers.
He said that 35 million Indian investors had registered with his platform in 2025 and a “significant amount of population” was yet to come into the capital markets.
