Lohia Corp IPO: Should You Bid on the Machine That Makes the Bags?

Three mainboard IPOs open on the same day this week: MIM, Xtrnet, and Lohia Corp. That kind of pile-up usually means one thing gets less attention than it deserves, and I think it's this one. Lohia Corp doesn't make anything glamorous. It makes the machines that make woven plastic sacks, the kind that hold cement, fertiliser, and grain. Not a pitch deck buzzword in sight. But the numbers underneath are genuinely interesting, and the grey market has noticed.

Here's what's actually going on with the issue, and whether the ₹425 top end is asking you to overpay for a business you've probably never thought about.

The basics

Lohia Corp's IPO opens Thursday, July 23, 2026, and closes the following Monday, July 27. It's a pure offer for sale (OFS) of 2.59 crore shares, working out to ₹1,101.28 crore at the top of the band. Not one rupee of that goes into the company; existing shareholders, mainly the Lohia family, are simply selling down their stake. Promoter holding drops from 95.61% to 75.24% after listing.

The price band sits at ₹404 to ₹425 per share, face value ₹1. A retail lot is 35 shares, so the minimum cheque size at the cap price is ₹14,875. If you want to go in as a small HNI, you're looking at 14 lots (₹2.08 lakh), and the big-HNI threshold starts at 68 lots, around ₹10.1 lakh.

Equirus Capital and Motilal Oswal Investment Advisors are running the book. MUFG Intime is the registrar. Listing is tentatively pegged for July 30 on both BSE and NSE.

What the company actually does

Lohia Corp is 3 years old on paper (incorporated June 2023 as the parent entity, though the underlying business goes back much further under the earlier "Kanpur Packaging Machines" name). It builds machinery for the entire woven-fabric chain: tape extrusion lines, circular looms, coating and lamination lines, printing machines, winders, monofilament lines, and recycling equipment. If a factory somewhere is turning polypropylene granules into cement bags or FIBC container liners, there's a decent chance a Lohia machine is doing part of that job.

The scale is bigger than I expected going in. As of March 2026 the company had shipped over 2,447 tape extrusion lines, more than half a million winders, and over a hundred thousand circular looms, cumulatively. It runs installed capacity for 240 tape extrusion lines, 13,800 looms, and 108,000 winders a year, with offices in Brazil, Russia, Thailand, the UAE, and the US, plus warehousing in India, the US, and the UAE. There's also a decent IP moat building up: 71 Indian patents, 56 filed abroad, 54 trademarks, and more applications in the pipeline.

One of the forum regulars on the message board put it well: these machines cover the full loop, from making the tape and yarn to weaving, coating, printing, converting into bags, and recycling the waste back into the system. Durable packaging demand and the push toward circular manufacturing aren't going away, so the sector has some structural tailwind behind it even if it never makes headlines.

The financials, and why the growth is not a rounding error

This is where the IPO gets more interesting than the "boring machinery company" label suggests.

Metric (₹ Cr)	FY25	FY26	Change
Total Income	1,386.47	1,737.87	+25%
PAT	117.84	193.45	+64%
EBITDA	228.60	339.45	+48%
Total Assets	967.60	1,304.66	+35%
Total Borrowings	212.16	152.78	-28%

Revenue is up a quarter year on year, which is solid but not unheard of. Profit growing 64% on top of that is the number that makes you sit up, because it means margins expanded at the same time as the top line grew. EBITDA margin moved from 16.49% to 19.53%, and PAT margin went from 8.5% to 11.13%. Debt is shrinking too, down from ₹212 crore to ₹153 crore, which pulled debt-to-equity from 0.47 down to 0.23. A company that's growing revenue, expanding margins, and deleveraging in the same year is doing something right, or at least doing it in a very favourable cycle.

Return ratios back this up. ROE sits at 36.8% and ROCE at a striking 40.92% for FY26, both up sharply from the prior year. Those are the kind of numbers that usually belong to asset-light service businesses, not machinery manufacturers, and they're a big part of why the valuation doesn't look outrageous even at a premium price band.

Is ₹425 expensive?

At the upper band, Lohia Corp is asking for a P/E of roughly 23.2x on FY26 earnings, against a post-issue market cap of ₹4,490 crore. Compare that with the peer set the company itself has listed:

Company	P/E (x)	RoNW (%)
Lohia Corp	23.21	72.95
Rajoo Engineers	18.27	14.16
Mamata Machinery	62.07	8.13
Jyoti CNC Automation	54.60	16.79
LMW	134.25	4.56
Windsor Machines	—	0.13

Lohia's multiple is actually on the cheaper end of this list, and its return on net worth blows every peer out of the water. Rajoo Engineers is the only name pricing lower, and it's not close on profitability. If this comparison holds up, Lohia isn't the expensive one in the room. That said, an OFS-only issue always deserves a raised eyebrow: the people who know this business best are choosing to sell down a fifth of their stake at this price, not raise fresh capital to grow it further. That's not automatically a red flag, but it's worth sitting with.

What the grey market is saying

As of the morning of July 20, GMP is running at ₹60, up from ₹20 the day before and effectively nil the day before that. Layered on the ₹425 cap, that implies a listing estimate around ₹485, or roughly 14% upside if the trend holds. Sauda rates in the retail category are being quoted around ₹1,600 and small-HNI subject-to-sauda around ₹22,400, both signs that there's real appetite building, not just noise.

I'd treat the GMP number the way I treat any grey market figure: directionally useful, not gospel. It moved from ₹0 to ₹60 in about 48 hours, which tells you sentiment is warming up fast as the open date approaches, and it also tells you the number could just as easily cool off if the broader market gets choppy before listing day. Grey market pricing has a habit of running ahead of itself in the final stretch of subscription week.

The bigger picture

The read I keep coming back to: Lohia Corp is not a story stock. It's a market leader in a niche most investors will never think about, growing profit faster than revenue, cutting debt, and pricing at a discount to its own peer set on paper. The OFS structure means the IPO is really a chance for the promoter family to monetise part of a stake they've built over decades, and you should go in with eyes open about that. But the underlying business, on the numbers available right now, looks like it's earning the premium rather than borrowing against a good story.

Whether it's a fit for your portfolio depends on your appetite for a somewhat illiquid, sector-specific industrial name with strong return ratios but limited fresh-capital upside. Worth doing your own homework on the RHP before the issue closes on July 27, particularly around customer concentration and how much of that growth is coming from exports versus the domestic market.

This is not investment advice. IPO investing carries risk, and grey market premiums are unofficial, unregulated indicators that can move sharply before listing. Please read the RHP and consult a financial advisor before applying.