From a desk in London or New York, talk of capital flowing into emerging markets can have an abstract feel. But the money has been rushing into tangible places: oilfields in the Atlantic’s Santos basin, the pipework of online Russia, coal pits in Chhattisgarh, and the rural branches of a lumbering Chinese bank.

These assets are controlled by four companies that have been sold on the stock markets of Brazil, Russia, India and China in the past four months, through initial public offerings and secondary share issues that, between them, raised $54bn of capital and generated an equal amount of buzz.

The share sales have embodied a defining feature of today’s investment world – the exuberance over fast-growing emerging markets – and there are more of them to come.