Prime Database

About Prime Database

Prime Database is the flagship capital-market information service of the PRIME Database Group, founded in New Delhi in April 1989 by Prithvi Haldea. It is India's pioneering — and, by its own long-standing description, still the only — comprehensive database on the Indian primary capital market, tracking every rupee raised by the corporate sector and the government through equity, debt or securitisation, in India or abroad. Its official website is primedatabase.com. For more than three and a half decades, PRIME's data on IPOs, public issues, buybacks and fundraising has been the reference point for regulators, investment bankers, the financial press and researchers — the most-cited primary-market database in the country.

Overview

PRIME Database runs extensive databases on public issues (IPOs and FPOs), rights issues, private placements, QIPs, preferential allotments, venture capital and overseas offerings, as well as databases on buybacks, delistings and takeover open offers. By 31 January 2008 it had tracked and analysed over 33,000 offerings, including 5,918 public issues — a dataset that effectively constitutes the statistical history of India's primary capital market since liberalisation. The service is subscription-based, with more than 5,000 institutional subscribers across every segment of the market: regulators, financial institutions, investment bankers, brokers, advertising agencies, registrars, stock exchanges, and the corporate sector itself.

Its subscriber roll-call reads like a directory of Indian finance: the Ministry of Finance, the Reserve Bank of India, SEBI, DSP Merrill Lynch, JM Financial, Morgan Stanley, Kotak Mahindra, SBI Capital Markets, Citibank, HSBC, CRISIL, and the NSE and BSE. When these institutions need a number on Indian primary-market fundraising, they take it from PRIME.

Founding in 1989

Prithvi Haldea, an MBA from BITS Pilani (1971), spent eighteen years in the corporate sector — in exports, consulting, advertising and publishing — including a stint as a consultant with the World Bank and with the U.S. Department of Commerce, before setting up PRIME Database in 1989. The timing was prescient: India stood on the edge of the 1991 economic liberalisation, which would unleash a wave of public issues and create, for the first time, a mass primary market needing independent data.

Haldea's background in financial advertising and IPO consulting — he had run a financial-advertising and IPO-consulting practice through the 1980s — gave him a practitioner's view of the information gap: issuers, bankers and investors were all operating without a single reliable record of what the market had done. PRIME was built to be that record.

What the database tracks

The core product is completeness. Every public issue — IPO or FPO — is captured with its terms, subscription levels, pricing and listing performance. Around that core, PRIME built out the full taxonomy of primary-market activity: rights issues, private placements, qualified institutional placements, preferential issues, venture-capital deals, overseas offerings, buybacks, delistings and open offers under the takeover code. From 2001 to 2003, in collaboration with Thomson Financial of the USA, PRIME created the first-ever database on the Indian venture-capital industry.

The annual statistics PRIME publishes have become the market's official scorecard. Its year-end roundups — such as the December 2010 report recording that public equity issues mobilised a then-record Rs 69,192 crore in 2010, with year-by-year IPO/FPO tables stretching back to 1989 — are quoted across the financial press as the definitive account of each year's fundraising.

The most-cited database in Indian finance

PRIME's media footprint is extraordinary for a data company. By its own count, it had been quoted over 20,000 times in mainline newspapers, magazines and television programmes within its first two decades, and its research is cited on global platforms including Reuters, Bloomberg, Google, Yahoo, Rediff and Indiatimes. When a newspaper reports that IPO fundraising hit a record, or that anchor-investor participation changed the character of a year's issues, the number almost always comes from PRIME.

That citation habit is the product of two things: accuracy and continuity. PRIME's reputation, in its own description, rests on being "highly regarded for its accuracy, timeliness and coverage" — and a dataset that runs unbroken from 1989 is irreplaceable. No competitor can retroactively build a 35-year time series.

Prithvi Haldea: data entrepreneur and investor activist

Haldea paired the database business with investor-protection activism. He has served on a remarkable roster of official bodies: the government's Standing Council of Experts for the Financial Sector, SEBI's Primary Market Advisory Committee and Market Data Advisory Committee, the board of SEBI's Central Listing Authority, the first trusteeship of the PFRDA, the Finance Minister's high-level expert committees on corporate bonds, the boards of governors of the Indian Institute of Corporate Affairs, and the governing councils of the ICAI and ICSI. He spent nearly six years on the board of UTI Mutual Fund and serves as a public-interest director on the MCX and adviser to the Association of Investment Bankers of India.

Alongside the flagship database, he launched a suite of public-interest websites: watchoutinvestors.com, primedirectors.com, directorsdatabase.com and msmementor.in, a national skills registry for MSMEs. He created iepf.gov.in, an investor-education initiative in eleven languages, and redesigned the Department of Disinvestment's website. Away from finance, he founded the Ibaadat Foundation to promote Urdu poetry, serves as founder-adviser to Rekhta, and is described as a devoted fan of the singer Mukesh.

The annual primary-market scorecard

PRIME's year-end reports are events in the financial calendar. The data tells the market's story in numbers: the 132 IPOs of 1989 raising Rs 2,316 crore; the 1990s boom peaking at 1,429 issues in 1995; the drought of the early 2000s (6 IPOs in 2002); the revival from 2004; the 2010 record of Rs 69,192 crore across 64 IPOs and FPOs. Each year's report adds texture — the spread of ASBA adoption, the role of anchor investors, the migration of listings from regional exchanges to the BSE and NSE — turning raw fundraising data into market history.

For investment bankers, these tables are league-table material; for regulators, they are the evidence base for policy; for journalists, they are the story. PRIME's ability to serve all three audiences from the same dataset is the core of its franchise.

Business model

PRIME is a subscription information business in the classic mould: a proprietary dataset with high fixed costs of collection and near-zero marginal costs of distribution, sold to institutions that cannot operate without it. The 5,000-plus subscriber base spans the entire primary-market ecosystem, which means the database is both the product and the network — its value rises as more of the market's participants standardise on its numbers.

The group's newer ventures extend the model into adjacent data: director databases, investor-protection registries, MSME skills data. Each follows the same logic — identify an information gap in Indian finance, fill it authoritatively, and let the citations compound.

Place in India's information industry

In the landscape of Indian business information, PRIME Database is the primary-market counterpart to CMIE's economic databases and the credit bureaus' lending data: the authoritative private record of a market the state does not itself compile in usable form. It was founded just before liberalisation made it indispensable, and it has remained indispensable through every subsequent market cycle — the 1990s IPO mania, the tech boom and bust, the 2008 crisis, the 2010s revival, and the record-breaking listings of the 2020s. For anyone who needs to know what India Inc. raised, when, and how, there is still only one place to look.