HCL Info focuses on ICT biz in India

MUMBAI, INDIA: HCL Infosystems Ltd., the IT hardware vendor, has major plans to focus and expand its ICT business in India.

According to HCL Infosystems' founder and chairman Ajai Chowdhry, HCL is one of the largest companies totally focusing on growing ICT market in India.

“We want to deeply focus initially on Indian market and once we see opportunities of growing elsewhere we would look at those opportunities. Fundamentally, when we look at the India market, we are looking at world's largest growing market in different areas. In ICT itself, there are various areas that are growing extremely well,” said Chowdhry.

HCL Infosystems' business portfolios include products and services business, system integrations and training and education. According to Chowdhry, the company is keen on focusing on education business and will work in providing educational multimedia content to government and private schools for K12.

“A large number of schools in India are looking up to set up smart classes, where multimedia content is used to teach students various subjects like mathematics, social sciences, etc. So we are actually getting into that business this year,” he said.

Further, “We have made investments in creating content and probably in next 12-24 months our content would be literally powerful and we want to be deeply into this business. We have been into this business from hardware products but now our whole objective is going out in an integrated manner by which we can provide hardware services and content,” said Chowdhry.

Company is mainly focusing on the education market, where it is investing with a software content company to create the content. Also, it will be hiring sales teams for this market.

Chowdhry informed that the company will raise funds of about Rs 820 crore which include Rs 500 crore via qualified institutional investors (QIP) and remaining Rs 320 crore through sale of shares and warrants.

“Supporting our system integration and services business is the fundamental reason for raising funds. In addition to boost and invest upfront for various system integration projects, we will need money for security business and also for future acquisitions,” Chowdhry said.

Apart from products and services, system integration, training and education portfolios, the company has strong presence in the areas of e-governance, health and power. According to Chowdhry, behind these growth areas, there's room within system integration and services business for creating back end services centers.

“We want to create lots of back end services centers, which will be domain specific and will work on creating services and products. Some of back end services would be such as software development services for developing products, managed services and remote infrastructure management,” explained Chowdhry.