STRATEGIC INFORMATION CONTENTS DISCLOSED BY THE GOING PUBLIC FIRMS IN THEIR IPO PROSPECTUS

Abstract: This paper aims at identifying the different categories of information disclosed by the going public firms and practices adopted by them at the time of IPO issue in their IPO prospectus in India. The paper adopted the thematic analysis qualitative approach to identify the information contents for the 139 firms from their IPO prospectus for the period from January 2012 to December 2020 downloaded from SEBI website. The paper identified the 12 themes representing the information categories and described in the paper. The paper also describes the themes and sub themes, their keywords and their relative importance for the Indian firms and the investors.Even though many firms in developing economies have started reporting and managing valuable informationboth mandatory and non-mendatory, real information disclosure is still at infancy stage and is mostly restricted to intellectual capital so far as it adds value to the competitive advantage of the companies. Keeping in view such issues, present study is conducted on information disclosure in IPO prospectus of selected Indian companies going public.

Keywords: IPO, prospectus, thematic analysis, information disclosure, intellectual capital