SEBI Open Market Buy-Backs Return August 1

SEBI Open Market Buy-Backs Are Back, and the Queue Is Already Forming In the spring of 2024, when SEBI quietly shuttered the open market buy-back route and pushed companies toward the tender offer mechanism, several CFOs at India's largest IT firms found themselves sitting on swelling cash piles with fewer tools to deploy them. Two years later, SEBI's June 2026 board meeting reversed that call. Effective August 1, 2026, listed companies can once again repurchase their own shares through stock exchanges, and the market is already pricing in who moves first. The mechanics matter here. Companies executing open market buy-backs must complete the entire program within 66 working days and deploy at least 40% of earmarked funds during the first half of that window. That front-loading requirement is deliberate. It prevents companies from announcing a buy-back and then dragging their feet, a pattern that frustrated shareholders under older frameworks. The result is a harder, faster price support mechanism than investors have seen from Indian corporates in some time. This isn't a small regulatory footnote. Open market buy-backs historically provide sustained price floors rather than the one-time pop that tender offers generate. When TCS ran its ₹18,000 crore tender offer in 2023, the stock jumped sharply around the record date and then drifted. A sustained open market program means active buying across weeks, absorbing daily sell pressure and compressing the float incrementally. IT Sector Sits on the Largest Cash Reserves The sector with the most immediate capacity to act is Indian IT. [Infosys](/stock/INFY) (NSE: INFY) had cash and equivalents of approximately ₹34,000 crore on its balance sheet as of March 2026, generating free cash flow at roughly 85-90% of net income. [TCS](/stock/TCS) (NSE: TCS) is in an even stronger position, with over ₹55,000 crore in liquid assets. TCS has returned more than ₹1.2 lakh crore to shareholders through buy-backs since 2017, so this is...