About 50 per cent of Container Corporation of India (Concor) employees picked up shares worth ₹9.76 crore in the public sector undertaking’s offer-for-sale, it is learnt. But in value terms, this works out to about a third of the value of shares reserved for employees, as on Friday.

Recently, Concor employees were given the option to buy shares at ₹1,135.25 apiece. This was the value offered in the market during the divestment process. Each employee could buy a maximum of 176 shares, effectively, totalling up to ₹26.59 crore, said multiple sources.

Institutional investors

The offer price is lower than the lowest value at which shares were traded on the bourses in the past three months — ₹1,298 as on September 15 and ₹1,518 as on August 1, according to BSE data.

The PSU major has sizeable institutional presence. According to exchange filing, at the end of June, 413 foreign portfolio investors held 28.44 per cent stake in the company. These include, T Rowe Price (1.04 per cent), Monetary Authority of Singapore (1.39 per cent), Matthews Pacific Tiger Fund (2.81 per cent), Government of Singapore (1.98 per cent) and Aberdeen Global Indian Equity (3.23 per cent).

Among domestic funds, LIC of India holds 3.05 per cent and ICICI Prudential MF (3.27 per cent).

In a recent interview, Concor’s outgoing CMD Anil Kumar Gupta told BusinessLine that 50 per cent of its employees opted to buy shares of Concor. The share allocation process is currently on, said sources. Concor has about 1,450 employees. Recently, the company employed 140 new employees.

The last time such an offer was made to Concor employees was in 1995.

On Friday, Concor shares ended at ₹1,375, up almost 1.79 per cent, on the BSE.

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