Punjab's Behari Lal Engineering Stuns D-Street With 63% Listing Gain As IPO Market Roars Back
Behari Lal Engineering IPO listing saw a 63% debut gain on NSE/BSE — the Mandi Gobindgarh steel firm’s stunning ride, plus full context on India’s reviving IPO market.
North Desk Correspondent
Chandigarh, August 19
Behari Lal Engineering IPO Listing: A steel foundry from a small town in Fatehgarh Sahib just gave Dalal Street its best listing of the year.
Shares of Behari Lal Engineering Limited, headquartered in Mandi Gobindgarh, debuted on the NSE and BSE on Wednesday at ₹465 — a 63.15% premium over its issue price of ₹285 — turning a ₹14,820 retail investment into a paper gain of roughly ₹9,360 for lucky allottees within minutes of trading. On the BSE, the stock opened at ₹458, up 60.7%. The company’s market capitalisation touched approximately ₹1,937 crore on debut day, for a business that raised just ₹301.62 crore through its IPO.
It wasn’t a one-off. The listing came on a day the Indian primary market saw a genuine burst of activity: Shiprocket, the Gurugram-based e-commerce logistics unicorn backed by Temasek and Zomato, listed with gains of roughly 30-34% on its ₹1,617-crore issue, subscribed nearly 100 times over.
Sunshine Pictures, Shankesh Jewellers, Lalithaa Jewellery Mart and Gaja Alternative Asset Management are also among the names making their exchange debuts in next few days; a cluster of listings that market watchers are already calling one of the strongest weeks of the year for IPO Street.
Who is Behari Lal Engineering
Behari Lal Engineering IPO Listing: Behind the ticker is a family business with roots going back over a century. According to the company’s own account and its regulatory filings, the enterprise traces its origins to 1910, when Behari Lal Garg started a business in Patiala. His son, Parkash Chand Garg — now the company’s Chairman — set up Behari Lal & Sons as a steel commodities trading concern in Mandi Gobindgarh in 1958. The current entity, incorporated in 1995, moved into large-scale manufacturing in February 2012 when it commissioned a Steel Melting Shop and Foundry Division at Village Salani on Amloh Road, and added a Rolling Mill Division at Village Turan in March 2022.
The company is now run by the next two generations of the Garg family — promoters Parkash Chand Garg (Chairman), Rajesh Garg, Dinesh Garg (Managing Director), Lovlish Garg (Whole-Time Director) and Bhuvnesh Garg (CEO) — who together held about 88.5% of the company before the IPO.
Behari Lal Engineering makes precision-engineered steel products rather than commodity steel: metal rolls for rolling mills, engineering castings ranging from 500 kg to 20 metric tonnes for the steel, mining and power sectors, alloy and stainless steel bars, and forging ingots. Its two manufacturing units in Mandi Gobindgarh — a town long known as one of India’s steel re-rolling hubs — span roughly 790,000 square feet with a combined capacity of about 1,19,464 tonnes. The company counts more than 1,800 domestic and international clients, including names like BMW Industries, Shyam Metallics, Jai Balaji Industries and Metso India, and reported revenue of ₹546.52 crore and profit of ₹64.64 crore for FY26, up from ₹516.30 crore and ₹52.95 crore a year earlier.
The IPO itself — a ₹301.62 crore book-built issue comprising a ₹93 crore fresh issue and a ₹208.62 crore offer for sale — was subscribed 108.44 times overall. Anchor investors including Tata AIA Life Insurance, PineBridge Global Funds, WhiteOak Capital and Bandhan Mutual Fund put in ₹90.49 crore ahead of the public offer. Proceeds from the fresh issue are earmarked mainly for new machinery and rooftop solar installations at its two plants, and partial debt repayment.
Brokerage voices were largely positive going in. Shivani Nyati, head of wealth at Swastika Investmart, noted that Behari Lal Engineering commands a 10-11.5% domestic market share in metal rolls, and that the issue was priced at a relatively reasonable 18.7x FY26 earnings — well below the roughly 31x average for listed peers such as AIA Engineering, Steelcast and Vardhman Special Steel. She suggested allottees consider booking partial profits into the listing-day strength while tracking a stop-loss around ₹380 for those holding on.
The bigger picture: an IPO market that had gone quiet
The scale of Wednesday’s gains matters more because of what preceded them. India’s IPO market had a record FY26 by value — about ₹1.9 lakh crore raised across 366 mainboard and SME issues, per a Grant Thornton Bharat report — but the numbers masked a cooling trend. Average listing-day gains fell to around 7% from much higher levels in FY25, and average oversubscription dropped to 39 times from 71 times, as investors turned more selective on valuations and governance rather than chasing momentum.
That caution deepened through the middle of 2026. Bloomberg reported in early August that IPO proceeds for the year were down roughly a fifth compared to the same period in 2025, with companies cutting deal sizes and delaying listings — Zepto’s IPO delay was cited as the latest sign of the boom losing steam.
Several high-profile names, including Manipal Health, Indo-MIM and Juniper Green Energy, had trimmed their offer sizes to get deals across the line. Earlier in the year, prominent debuts including Amagi Media Labs, Shadowfax Tech, Fractal Analytics and Aye Finance had listed flat or below their issue price, a sharp contrast to the blockbuster gains investors had grown used to in 2024 and 2025.
Against that backdrop, this week’s listings — Behari Lal Engineering’s 63% pop, Shiprocket’s 30-34% gain, and healthy grey-market premiums on Sunshine Pictures and others — represent a genuine, if possibly temporary, revival in listing-day enthusiasm. Whether it holds beyond this week, or proves another short-lived pocket of momentum in an otherwise more cautious market, is the question investment bankers and analysts will now be watching closely.
For Mandi Gobindgarh, though, the story is simpler and more immediate: a local foundry family just watched their business get valued at nearly ₹2,000 crore by the country’s stock markets, on a single Wednesday morning.
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