Mumbai, June 23: A mammoth direct marketing effort by the National Securities Depository Ltd has paid off. About 1.50 crore shares of Industrial Credit & Investment Corporation of India (ICICI) will be transferred electronically to existing SCICI Ltd shareholders, following the merger of the two entities.

The direct marketing process will now be applied by National Securities Depository Ltd to the forthcoming bonus issue of Reliance and the recently announced bonus issue of software major, Infosys Technologies.

A total of about 7.90 crore ICICI shares are going to be issued to SCICI shareholders following the merger in the ratio of two ICICI shares for every five SCICI shares.

National Securities Depository Ltd has set up a module to facilitate direct transfer of shares in the dematerialised form, in cases of primary issues and transfer of bonus and post merger shares.

To attract more investors to the depository mode, NSDL identified all the shareholders of SCICI with a holding of more than 500 shares. It then individually approached these investors and asked them to avail of the facility wherein they could directly receive the ICICI shares in a dematerialised form.

"We have got a tremendous response from the shareholders. A lot of doubts which investors had regarding the system were clarified in the process. As a result of the exercise, a crore and a half shares of ICICI will be electronically transferred", said Gagan Rai, executive director of National Securities Depository Ltd.

"As per the arrangement, all the investor needs to do is to open an account with a depository participant and provide him details of his holdings in SCICI. The shares of ICICI due to him would automatically be credited into his account in a dematerialised form", he said.

"The other advantage that this move would have is that given the ratio of 5:2 there would be a large number of odd-lots that would arise. Now that the concept of market lots and odd lots has been done away with it in the dematerialised segment, it would be a great benefit to the investors to pick up dematerialised ICICI shares," he added.

Rai explained that during the process investors were provided details of the depository participants that they could approach and the various costs involved in the process.

"In the case of the Hudco bonds issue, which was the first time when the primary market module was applied, we did not get a very good response as not only were there very few DPs at that time but investors too were not very familiar with the system. All that has changed now, if the ICICI experience is anything to go by," said Rai.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.