INDIA BUSINESS WORLD - MARCH 2006
THE MONTH THAT WAS

TELEDATA INFO BUYS ALPHASOFT FOR $14 MILLION

TELEDATA Informatics has acquired the US-based IT services company Alphasoft Services Corp (ASC) for $14.150 million.Alphasoft is a $28 million company providing high quality IT services in the areas of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), data warehousing, e-business and related technologies.

Teledata has also acquired three other companies that are based overseas, for a sum of $24 million. Further details of these companies are not available as yet.

“The acquisitions are being financed through $55 million raised from an issue of global depository receipts (GDR) in January '06,'' said Teledata Informatics MD Mr K Padmanabhan. During the last two years, the company has raised a total of $113 million from three GDR issues.

Foreign shareholding accounts for 10.97% of the total capital. The Indian public, corporates, NRIs and others have a 82.28% stake while institutional holding is 9.84%. The promoter holding, which earlier stood at 24%, has since come down to 7.87%. The promoters plan to augment their stake through an issue of convertible warrants/shares on a preferential basis to the company's shareholders. Details of this will be decided at the forthcoming board meeting on March 23, 2006. Teledata is a 15-year-old company that provides e-governance and ERP solutions. It has three business divisions — marine, educational and web products and services. The company's main products are Ship Manager for the shipping industry and WebEIM (Educational Institution Management) for the education segment.“With the Alphasoft acquisition, we now the full suite of IT products,” said Teledata chairman Gp.Capt.K Balasubramanian.

The company had earlier acquired an over 60% stake in SBC Data Systems, Ireland which provides solutions to the transportation and logistics industry.

According to the unaudited financial results for the nine months ended December '05, revenues amounted to Rs 589 crore compared to Rs 200 crore in the previous year. The net income is Rs 108.99 crore at the end of Q3 '05 compared to Rs 50.39 crore in the previous year.The revenues for the full year ended March '05 stood at Rs 339.87 crore while net income stood at Rs 87.63 crore. At the forthcoming board meeting, the company will also consider the demerger of its business into various divisions such as software products and services and marine business activities .