The National Stock Exchange's ₹22,569-crore IPO opens for bids today. Most of the coverage asks whether you should apply. The quieter story is on the other side of the trade: four listed state-run companies are selling NSE shares they bought for between ₹0.32 and ₹5.26 each. Because the shares must list within three working days of bidding closing on September 21, the gains should land in their September-quarter (Q2 FY27) results. For one of them, a single sale is worth more than an entire year of profit.

What's being sold, and what it cost

NSE's red herring prospectus (dated September 10, 2026) shows the offer is entirely an offer for sale: up to 12.64 crore existing shares at ₹1,700–1,785, with no new money going to NSE. Bidding closes Monday, September 21, and the prospectus requires listing within three working days. The quarter ends September 30.

The prospectus also discloses each seller's weighted average cost per share, certified by chartered accountants:

With costs that small, nearly all of it is pre-tax gain.

New India Assurance (NIACL): the gain is bigger than the business

Per its Q1 FY27 investor presentation, New India Assurance posted a net loss of ₹257 crore for April–June 2026, compared with a ₹391 crore profit a year earlier. Its combined ratio, which is claims plus expenses as a share of premium, was 121.44%. Anything above 100% means the insurance business itself is losing money. That produced an underwriting loss of ₹2,356 crore. The chairperson blamed a "significant spike in Motor TP loss ratio."

The NSE sale changes how the numbers look, not how the business runs. At ₹1,700–1,785, selling 1.05 crore shares brings in roughly ₹1,785–1,874 crore. That's more than NIACL's entire FY26 profit after tax of ₹1,384 crore, and more than double the ₹850 crore of capital gains it booked in Q1 FY27. NIACL's own results table counts capital gains inside investment income, which is added to the underwriting result to arrive at profit before tax.

Bank of Baroda (BANKBARODA): one sale beats last quarter's reported profit

A one-time charge flattened BoB's Q1 FY27: a USD 600 million out-of-court settlement with the administrators of NMC Health. On the Q1 FY27 call, management put reported net profit at ₹1,278 crore and said it would have been ₹5,528 crore without the settlement.

BoB's NSE sale is worth ₹1,307–1,373 crore, which is larger than that entire reported Q1 profit on its own. Q2 will be compared against a depressed Q1 and include a one-time gain. A several-fold quarter-on-quarter jump would say little about the bank's real run-rate; the fairer comparison is the ₹5,528 crore figure that excludes the settlement.

GIC Re (GICRE): cashing in value that was already counted

GIC Re reported Q1 FY27 profit before tax of ₹2,490.25 crore and profit after tax of ₹1,922.04 crore, with a combined ratio of 104.88%. At the top of the band, its NSE gain of about ₹1,101 crore equals roughly 44% of that quarter's pre-tax profit.

The key detail comes from the Q1 FY27 call. A JP Morgan analyst asked whether GIC Re's market-value investment book already included NSE. The chief investment officer said the market value of ₹1,57,800 crore "includes NSE also." So the value was already in GIC Re's reported book; the IPO just turns part of it into cash and a booked gain.

SBI (SBIN): small next to its profit, and SBI hasn't said how it will book it

Up to ₹2,851 crore of proceeds compares with a record Q1 FY27 net profit of ₹21,121 crore. That's about 13.5%, or roughly 21% if you add SBI Capital Markets' ~₹1,567 crore. Q2 also includes the listing of SBI Funds Management, and an analyst on the Q1 FY27 call noted that gain "will be coming in the current quarter."

SBI hasn't explained how it will account for the NSE stake. On the Q1 FY26 call (August 2025), an analyst asked what method SBI used to value it. Chairman C S Setty replied: "When the NSE gets listed, you will come to know what methodology we are adopting." Since April 2024, SBI's results notes have shown some investment gains going to an "AFS Reserve" on the balance sheet instead of through profit. Read the notes to the Q2 results to see where the NSE gain ends up.

This has happened before

IIFL Finance is a smaller precedent. On its October 2024 earnings call, management traced a one-off fair-value gain of "about 80 crores or something" to NSE shares it had sold, adding: "I think that is not recurring."

LIC is the contrast. It is NSE's largest shareholder with 10.72%, according to the prospectus, and it isn't selling, so it gets no sale gain.

What retail investors should do

If you own or are watching SBI, Bank of Baroda, GIC Re or New India Assurance, don't treat their Q2 FY27 headline profit as a turnaround. When results come out in October and November:

And don't buy them as a backdoor NSE play: the proceeds are one-time cash. Figures assume the full offer sells within the ₹1,700–1,785 band.

Data sourced from company filings on NSE via Xaro.