Tempest commences India operations

BANGALORE: Tempest Consultants, has commenced Web development operations in

India, complementing its existing capability in London. Based at the

International Technology Park, Whitefield, the new company, Tempest Consultants

Private Ltd., will have 50 IT professionals manning it over the coming year.

Tempest is making its professional rankings of equity research available to

the millions of individual investors who use FT.com. TempestDirect, hosted by

FT.com, the global business portal, will allow individual investors to identity

the most influential analysts globally–on a company, industry sector and

country basis. TempestDirect includes over 7,000 rankings of equity research,

judged by fund management groups and quoted companies. The service is expected

to go live on FT.com in August 2000.

Chairman and CEO of Tempest Stephen Parker said, "What our global family

of rankings does is to provide a widely respected system of evaluation on the

quality of research of individual analysts and teams. This is based on separate

assessments by both, the biggest fund management groups and the quoted companies

in 49 countries around the world. Currently, more than 65 Indian companies are

listed under quoted companies. This figure is expected to increase to 80 next

year. For the first time, individual investors will be able to identify, stock

by stock, the best broker research on over 6,100 corporations. And this will be

in six languages–English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese."