The Indian IPO market is nothing short of a genie these days.

A marquee anchor book, juicy grey-market premiums, and a compelling narrative can take almost anything home. Peyush Bansal and the selling shareholders in Lenskart had a wish, and the genie granted it.

The spectacle maker’s Rs 7,300 crore public issue, mostly an offer for sale, sailed through comfortably. Never mind the outrageIndian ExpressLenskart IPO: Netizens slam ‘shark’ Peyush Bansal for 230x valuation regarding its seemingly preposterous valuations—over 250X price-to-earnings. The company checked all the boxes—the total addressable market, growth potential and, more importantly, its bottom line. It swung from a Rs 10 crore loss in FY24 to nearly Rs 300 crore profit in FY25.

Except, it didn’t.

A one-time gain—linked to an earlier acquisitionScax XLenskart Reports Rs 297 Crore Profit, Boosted by Accounting Gain from Owndays Acquisition—propped up Lenskart’s FY25 profit, without which it’d have more than halved, doubling its IPO valuation to over 500X. The company housed that adjustment under “other income”, an omnibus that includes non-core revenues such as interest on deposits, gain on sale or fair valuation of financial instruments.

Take that “other income” away—Lenskart would remain loss-making at the core. Even in the June 2025 quarter, its profit would’ve shrunk to near nothing. Remove the deferred tax creditDeferred tax creditA tax-related income boost (another non-core income) it reported, and the bottom line would bleed red.

The current IPO market is nothing like the 2021 waveThe KenThe Indian IPO wave throwing the rulebook out the window, when several loss-making companies—the likes of food-delivery giant Zomato (now Eternal) and payments platform Paytm*—rode the category-leader narrative, and losses didn’t matter.

Now, profitability, or big growth in profits, is a much-valued and much-vaunted metric for IPO-bound companies. And when their core earnings don’t make the cut, they’re increasingly relying on the “doosra”—or the “other” earnings—to pave their way to profits and public-market glory.