Hindustan Coca-Cola Holdings, the parent of Coca-Cola’s largest Indian bottler, is expected to file its draft prospectus with India’s market regulator this week, Moneycontrol reports. The offering of about $1 billion is expected to value the company at close to $10 billion, with a listing likely in 2027. Is this a good deal? For whom?
The deal is expected to be mainly a sale of existing shares, so the money will go to the sellers, not into expanding the business in India.
The sellers have already done well. The current owners are Coca-Cola (60%) and an Indian group, the Jubilant Bhartia Group (40%). The Indian group had substantial backing from Goldman Sachs and debt from Indian mutual funds. In 2024, the Goldman-backed Indian group agreed to buy the 40% stake from Coca-Cola for a reported ₹12,500 crore (about $1.5 billion). That price valued the whole company at about $3.7 billion. Less than two years later, the target is nearly $10 billion. Indian savers’ money helped buy the stake at the lower price. Now they may be asked to buy its shares at the higher one.
Coca-Cola’s sale fits its long-running strategy of handing bottling to local partners around the world. But Coca-Cola is not alone. Since 2024, five of six foreign companies that listed their Indian units raised no new money at all. Their parents took home nearly $5 billion, more than 80% of it going to Hyundai and LG. Walmart’s PhonePe and Carlsberg are next in line. Venture-backed startups have done the same: more than half of the roughly $4.7 billion raised in 2025’s startup IPOs went to existing investors.
Foreign investors are selling.
Who is buying? Increasingly, ordinary Indian savers, many of them passive investors. Many Indians invest through Systematic Investment Plans (SIPs), automatic monthly contributions to mutual funds, much like Americans’ payroll contributions to 401(k) plans. SIP inflows reached a record of about $3.4 billion in September. In Hyundai’s October 2024 IPO, mutual funds took about a third of the shares set aside for anchor investors, at the top of the price range. Since then, Hyundai India’s annual profit has declined for two straight years, and its April–June profit fell another 35%. Yet the stock still traded at about 36 times earnings at the end of July.
The backdrop is not encouraging. Foreign portfolio investors have pulled about $33 billion out of Indian stocks this year, nearly double 2025’s record. Between the start of 2024 and June 2026, the rupee fell 13% against the dollar, and analysts link part of that to IPO money being sent abroad. Indian companies themselves have been reluctant to invest: private capital spending has been stuck at around 12% of GDP since 2011–12. In November 2025, even India’s Chief Economic Advisor warned that IPOs had become exit vehicles for early investors rather than a way to raise long-term capital.
Is Coca-Cola’s IPO one more sign that foreign investors, and India’s own companies, see better uses for their money than India?
— John Laxmi
Note: Rupee amounts are converted at the rate prevailing at the time: about ₹85 per dollar for the Jubilant deal (December 2024), about ₹88 for 2025 startup IPOs (2025 average), and ₹96.96 for September 2026 SIP inflows (October 12, 2026). The foreign-investor figure is as converted by the source.
