Behari Lal Engineering's shares made a blockbuster debut on the Indian stock market, listing at a premium of 63% on the National Stock Exchange (NSE).

The strong opening followed the company's ₹301.62-crore initial public offering (IPO), which was subscribed around 108 times overall. The offering received bids for 80.38 crore shares — roughly 803.8 million — against 74.13 lakh shares, or about 7.41 million, on offer.

Behari Lal Engineering is a Punjab-based iron and steel manufacturer. The sector it operates in has significant national scale: India is the world's second-largest producer of crude steel, and steel is a core input for construction, infrastructure and manufacturing across the economy.

For context, an IPO is the process through which a company sells its shares to the public for the first time and lists them on a stock exchange. An offering is described as oversubscribed when investors bid for more shares than are available, as was the case here by a wide margin. A stock that lists at a premium begins trading on the exchange above the price at which its shares were issued in the IPO. Oversubscription multiples are widely tracked as a gauge of investor demand for a new issue.

The NSE, headquartered in Mumbai, is one of India's two principal national stock exchanges and ranks among the world's largest bourses.

Following listings of this kind, market participants typically watch how a newly listed stock trades in subsequent sessions relative to its issue price, along with the company's first quarterly results as a listed entity, for early reads on the business.

Source: CNBC-TV18