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Follow UsBANGALORE: US based First Consulting Group Inc., is planning to ramp up its wholly owned Indian offshore development center, FCG Software Service (India) Pvt Ltd in Bangalore to 3,000 people by December 2005. An investment of $ three million has been earmarked for the expansion. It is also aggressively scouting for companies to acquire as part of its inorganic expansion growth.
The present workforce in India is about 400 and the company plans to increase it to 1000 employees by the end of 2004. "We are ramping up aggressively to cater to the demands of our parent company in the US for software development and services. The plan is to be 2000 strong by December 2005 but, I personally feel that the plan is aggressive enough for us to easily end up at 3000," said FCG Software Services (India) Managing Director, Avinash Agrawal.
Long Beach, California based FCG entered India with the acquisition of Atlanta based Paragon Solutions Inc., for $11.8 million in a cash and stock combination in February 2003. In the virtue of the buy, Paragon Solutions in India became FCG Software Services (India) and entered the software development and services space. Otherwise, FCG is traditionally a consulting company, catering exclusively the healthcare segment.
The expansion plans in India also include venturing into the ITES space. "The acquisition plan includes buying an ITES company, so it saves us time and effort to build the expertise. We are looking for two to three companies in mid and small sized segments for the buy. One acquisition is sure to close this year," added Agrawal.
FCG has an employee base of 1,800 and five development centers across the globe. Two in the US (Pennsylvania and New Jersey), one each in London, Vietnam and India. Incidentally, the Bangalore center in India is the largest development center for the company.
While FCG’s global revenue is $280 million, last the year the development center in India contributed roughly Rs25 crore and plans to increase the contribution to Rs40 crore this fiscal.