The two-day offer for sale (OFS) opened on Thursday.
Over 4.13 crore shares were sought in the first three hours of trade on BSE, stock exchange data showed.
The shares sought 20 per cent of the overall issue size and nearly 23 per cent of the shares reserved for non-retail investors who were supposed to make bids on the opening day.
The government is selling 20.65 crore shares or 5 per cent of the total equity of Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL) through the OFS.
The government has an option to sell an additional 20.65 crore share of SAIL in case of over-subscription. The overall divestment, firm plus greenshoe, will total 10 per cent.
A floor price of Rs 64 per share was set for the OFS. The OFS for non-retail investors opens on Thursday. Retail investors can bid on Friday.
Of the 20.65 crore shares on offer, 18.07 crore have been reserved for non-retail investors and 2.58 crore for retail investors.
The indicative price of bids that came in on Thursday was Rs 64.45, exchange data showed.
At least 12.5 per cent of the offer shares will be reserved for the allocation to retail investors.
No single bidder other than mutual funds registered with Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) will be allocated over 25 per cent of the shares on offer, according to the terms of OFS.
A minimum of 25 per cent of shares will be reserved for mutual funds and insurance companies.
At the floor price, the sale of 41.3 crore shares (firm plus greenshoe) will fetch the government over Rs 2,600 crore.
The SAIL OFS is part of the government’s disinvestment programme through which it is targeting to raise a record Rs 2.1 lakh crore in the current fiscal ending March 31, 2021.
So far, the government has raised Rs 28,298.26 crore from disinvestment proceeds. This includes Rs 14,453.77 crore received as dividend from state-owned firms. The remaining Rs 13,844.49 crore proceeds include Rs 1,065.37 crore from selling shares in NTPC share buyback.
A Rs 4,600-crore initial public offering (IPO) of the Indian Railway Finance Corporation (IRFC), a public sector undertaking under the railways ministry, will open on January 18. The IPO comprises up to 178.2 crore shares of face value of Rs 10 each.
The government is expected to mobilise Rs 1,544 crore at the upper price band of Rs 25-26 per share.
The government is most likely to miss its disinvestment target by a wide margin and the fiscal deficit is not likely to be anywhere near the target of 3.5 per cent of the GDP in 2020-21 (April 2020 to March 2021).
While privatisation of firms such as Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd (BPCL) and Air India has been pushed to the next fiscal due to COVID-19-related delays, tax collections have been hit hard as restrictions imposed to curb coronavirus dented incomes all around.
