The word grameen means “of the village” in Bengali. But Grameenphone, Bangladesh’s biggest mobile-phone firm with over 21m subscribers, is now the toast of the town. On October 4th it opened the largest initial public offering (IPO) in Bangladesh’s history, aiming to raise 4.86 billion taka ($70m) from Bangladeshis at home and abroad. Non-residents have until October 18th to apply but the offer is already heavily oversubscribed. It has attracted over 1m applications, according to Citigroup, which arranged the offering.

Grameenphone is owned by Telenor, a Norwegian telephone company, and Grameen Telecom, a non-profit company founded by Muhammad Yunus, a pioneer of microfinance. His Grameen Bank gave millions of village entrepreneurs somewhere to borrow from. Grameenphone will give almost 350,000 budding Bangladeshi capitalists something to invest in.

They can now choose from 284 companies listed on the Dhaka Stock Exchange (DSE), many of which also trade on the Chittagong Stock Exchange. The market capitalisation of the DSE has more than doubled since August 2007 (turnover has quadrupled), but still amounts to only 16% of Bangladesh’s GDP. The market remains shallow, says Mustafa Mujeri of the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies, and vulnerable to price swings. The country’s other capital markets are even less developed. Bangladesh boasts a solitary corporate bond.

Mr Mujeri hopes Grameenphone’s IPO could make a “qualitative difference” to Bangladesh’s equity culture. On the offering’s opening day, Bangladeshis opened 28,000 new broking accounts, according to a local report, adding to a total of over 1.5m. The company will allocate shares by lottery, giving every successful applicant the minimum allotment of 14,000 takas before it gives anyone more than that. Bigger investors had their chance to buy a chunk of the firm in December.

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