If you stumble upon paper share certificates of a bluechip company tucked away in some corner of your locker that were bought, say 30 years ago, by your father or grandfather, your first reaction would be one of surprise. And then, you would possibly try to figure out how much they would be worth in the market today.
Something similar happened with one paediatric surgeon, Dr. Tanmay Motiwala. He came across some old shares of State Bank of India (SBI) that were bought by his grandfather way back in 1994. They were worth Rs 500 back then.
Dr. Motiwala, who took to social media to share his surprising discovery said that his grandfather had apparently forgotten about the shares or even why he had even bought them in the first place. He added that he accidently stumbled upon the shares while trying to consolidate the family’s holding in one place.
“My grandparents had purchased SBI shares worth Rs. 500 in 1994. They had forgotten about it. In fact, they had no idea why they purchased it and if they even held it. I found some such certificates while consolidating family’s holdings in a place,” he said in his post on X (formerly Twitter).
As soon as his post started gaining traction, it sparked a flood of reaction from the online community, with most people asking him the current value of those shares now.
Dr Motiwala answered the query in another post saying that it was worth around Rs 3.75 lakh at present, excluding dividends, or around 750 times the value in 1994.
Apparently, he has now already sent these shares for converting them to the dematerialised format, adding that the process was quite cumbersome and lengthy. According to the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) norms, the physical shares have to be first converted into electronic format before they can be transferred or traded.
“Seems like so many people are facing this issue. We actually took the help of an advisor/consultant. Because the process itself is very painful and long (There may be spelling errors in name, address, signature mismatch, etc etc). Even with an advisor it took time but we have been able to do for majority of certificates,” he said in his post.
