Another Jhunjhunwala long bet blooms with Concord Biotech offer

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

Concord Biotech launched its IPO Friday, joining the ranks of the late billionaire's other private investment portfolio companies such as Star Health, Metro Brands and Nazara Technologies that have gone public in the past couple of years. The ace investor often called India's Warren Buffet, first invested in Concord in 2004 and later helped the company's founder in buying back the company from pharma major Mylan in 2009.

Despite being invested in the company for close to two decades, Jhunjunwala's investment firm RARE Enterprises is not selling any shares in the Concord IPO and in fact, plans to continue to hold on to the shares for long as it feels that its investment can compound further, said Rajiv Agarwal, who oversees listed and private strategic investments of the firm. The ₹1,551-crore IPO, which was subscribed two times, values the 24% shareholding of Jhunjunwala family trusts at ₹1,867 crore.

In 2009, RARE invested approximately ₹49 crore in the company. «I see this business growing strongly and consistently for the next few years and it makes eminent sense for us to stay invested in a growth company that can compound for a long time,» said Agarwal.

«Investors are always on the lookout for businesses that can scale up profitably and after an inflection point do not need significant external capital to fund growth as they can do it internally. During our investing experience, we have realised that you need to back the right business model run by a passionate and execution-focused management team to reach that scale and inflexion point, which is easier said than done,» he said.

«I can say with confidence that Concord is one such business. We believe that Concord has reached a decent scale and given the long runway