Open Market Buybacks Return: Who Acts First?

Open Market Buybacks Are Back, and the Queue Is Forming SEBI's decision to reinstate open market buybacks via stock exchanges, effective August 1, 2026, is the most significant shift in India's shareholder return framework in years. The mechanism was banned in 2024 over price manipulation concerns. It returns now with guardrails: companies must complete buybacks within 66 working days and deploy at least 40% of the earmarked amount in the first 33 working days. That's not a soft guideline. It's a structural forcing function. The open market route was always the preferred tool for companies that wanted to signal confidence without the administrative drag of tender offers. It's faster, more visible, and when done right, it directly supports earnings per share by shrinking the float. The tender offer route remains available, but the new 66-day discipline makes the open market window genuinely attractive again for boards sitting on large cash piles. So the real question isn't whether companies will use this window. Some will. The question is which ones actually should, and which ones are likely to disappoint shareholders by treating buybacks as optics rather than capital discipline. IT Majors Have the Cash. Do They Have the Conviction? The large-cap IT sector is the obvious starting point. [TCS](/stock/TCS) (NSE: TCS) ended FY25 with over ₹59,000 crore in cash and equivalents. The company has a track record of buybacks, having completed a ₹17,000 crore tender offer in 2023. An open market program would let TCS support its stock during volatility without committing to a fixed price, which is a meaningful operational difference. At current valuations, TCS trades at roughly 26x forward earnings. A sustained buyback at these levels would be immediately EPS-accretive given the float reduction math. [Infosys](/stock/INFY) (NSE: INFY) and [Wipro](/stock/WIPRO) (NSE: WIPRO) are also worth watching, though for different reasons. Infosys returned ₹20,234 crore to shareholde...