India’s GDP has been growing at a rapid clip over the past decade and is set to grow at even a faster pace in the coming decade.Financial services penetration of the Indian economy is quite low compared to even other developing economies.With majority of the Indian population mired in poverty,access to banks and financial companies is quite hard as people lack knowledge and education.India’s banks have grown at a rapid pace over the past 2 decades after the financial liberalization.However this growth has still lacked in meeting the massive demand in the need of financial intermediation.This has led to the growth on non-banking financing companies (NBFCs) and microfinance companies.With the opening of the insurance sector,financial companies in India are set to enter a new growth phase.Major banks in India are either state owned or previous government owned institutions which have been fully privatized like ICICI and HDFC Bank.Both the state owned banks and the private banks have managed to grow without throwing the whole system in a crisis like what has happened in the recent past in Europe and USA and in China in the 1990s.Here is a list of the 10 Major Banks in India

Acropetal Technologies is a bit different from the run of the mill junk IPOs coming out in Feb 2011.After a deluge of crap IPOs in 2010,2011 has not seen many of them as the markets have corrected by around 15%.However a recent rally has bought out the junk companies in association with their associated shady bankers and market operators.Omkar,Sudar,FCL are some of the totally crap IPOs which have happened or in the process of happening.Acropetal Technologies is an IT/ITES company plans to raise Rs 170-crore through its IPO on February 21. The company has fixed the price-band of its IPO at between Rs 88 and Rs 90 per equity share.The company will use Rs 55 crore for acquisitions and Rs 26 crores for a software office.The company seems better quality than the junk and may merit a look from investors though there are much better companies on offer at better prices in the secondary markets.Here are the positives and negatives of the IPO

In the season of scams and scandals when the erstwhile high flying mid cap and small cap names are getting battered for management issues,Sudar Garments has surprisingly come out with an IPO despite spotty corporate governance issues.Like so many of the junk IPOs coming out in 2010,this one too should managed to raise money through market operators.The modus operandi of these IPOs is mostly pump and dump where a few unscrupulous and shady brokers are responsible for managing the issue.With the stock market regulator SEBI refusing to crack down on these blatant manipulation,the pipeline of crappy small cap junk IPOs in the Indian stock market keeps growing.Thought that the current market crash would have removed them,but apparently not so as the junk IPO industry keeps growing stronger.This despite the more than 50% crash on issue day of Omkar Chemicals ( a junk IPO).Here are some of the notable negatives of the issue which has been given a 1 out of a 5 rating by rating agency CRISIL (not that the rating help the retail investors).

Fineotex Chemicals (FCL) is a Maharashtra based small chemicals company which is coming out with an IPO for 4.2 million shares at Rs 60-72 to raise Rs 25-30 crores with a total market cap of around Rs 42-50 crores.The company has a 5000 tons plant and is expanding by 13000 tons.The company has little resources by way of cash and it seems strange that a Rs 15 crore company would raise money from the capital markets rather than raising more debt which seems low at around Rs 80 lakhs.Can’t find much to say anything positive except that there are no lawsuits pending against the promoters.Here are the negatives.

Omkar Specialty Chemicals was a major disaster for all the investors who decided to gamble on small cap IPO junk.Gambling on FCL in this environment does not make any sense,would make more sense to gamble your money in a casino.In this market you would have a much better chance of returns.

In 2010,the Indian Stock Market boomed for junk IPOs with a number of low quality issues raising money.Most of these stocks made no sense from the valuation point of view and were clearly being manipulated by stock market operators in nexus with their promoters.However,it was possible for retail investors to gamble and make money in IPOs by applying and selling on the day the issue listed.If you held on then massive losses were in store as most of the IPOs are trading at less than half of their initial price.Now it seems that even this tactic has gone out of fashion with another low quality IPO Omkar Speciality Chemicals going 50% below its issue price.Note the Indian stock market has falled by more than 15% in the last month or so,with many of the operator driven stocks taking a big hit.This means that these manipulated stocks have little support and would fall to their true value which is a small percentage of their issue price.Hopefully we won’t be seeing any more these crappy junk issues for a long time.

Note the issue size of the IPO is quite small at around $100 million which means the retail portion is only $30 million.Coal India IPO with a $3 billion issue and $1 billion retail portion got subscribed by almost 2-2.5x.This mean that Punjab and Sind Bank can get subscribed by almost 60x since MOIL IPO got 55-60 times overall subscription with almost 31x retail portion even when the issue size was almost triple that of Punjab and Sind Bank.Note though MOIL IPO in my opinion was more undervalued than PNSB,still I think oversubscription in case of this PSU Bank would be higher than that and could easily cross the 31x retail that MOIL IPO got