Hinduja TMT to buy US co. Source One

NEW DELHI: Hinduja TMT Ltd (HTMT) has signed an agreement with Georgeson Shareholder Communications Inc., to acquire 100 percent of Source One Communications Inc., USA (SOC) in an all cash deal of approximately $8.5 million funded entirely through internal accruals.

SOC has operations in USA, Canada and Philippines through a subsidiary called Source One Communications Asia (SOCA). SOCA is a JV company set up in 2001 between SOC (57.5 percent ownership) and Customer Contact Center Inc (c3), Manila (42.5 percent ownership). HTMT has recently acquired controlling interest in c3, which has independent revenue of $6.8 million and for which HTMT paid $3.9 million. With the acquisition of SOC and its current shareholding in SOCA, HTMT has consolidated its ownership of SOCA.

Commenting on the SOC acquisition, HTMT COO, K Thiagarajan said, "Source One is an excellent strategic fit to our past acquisition of c3. The current acquisition is a definitive step in the evolution of HTMT into a global ITES company. With this, HTMT is now in a position of having a strong front-end, enhanced service offerings, verticals and presence in multiple geographies. Cross selling BPO, call center services with multi-lingual capabilities, and IT in diversified verticals across different geographical locations now provides HTMT a very strong competitive edge against its peers leading to potential scaling and higher profitability."

"We believe that the scaling up of both SOCA and c3 operations based on excellent customer response to the quality and competitiveness delivered, is likely to considerably improve the topline and bottomline of the entities," he added.

SOC had consolidated revenue of $15.87 million in its fiscal year ended June 30, 2004. It currently operates a total of 500 call center seats in USA, Canada and the Philippines. Together with c3, the total number of seats in Manila amount to over 1,000. The total number of clients served by SOC, SOCA and c3 are 22.