Mumbai: India-focused private equity (PE) fund CX Partners Llp and Capital Square Partners Pte Ltd have exited their investment in business process outsourcing (BPO) firm Minacs Ltd by selling Minacs to US-based SYNNEX Corp. for $420 million, SYNNEX said on Monday.
SYNNEX, a Fortune 500 corporation, will integrate Minacs into its wholly-owned subsidiary Concentrix.
SYNNEX is a leading business process services company, optimizing supply chains and providing outsourced services focused on customer relationship management. Founded in 1980, SYNNEX operates in 26 countries around the world. Concentrix, with operations across 25 countries, has more than 70,000 employees servicing more than 400 clients in more than 40 languages. The company has a large delivery footprint in India, the Philippines, Europe, Asia/Pacific, North America and South America, said a company statement.
Anil Bhalla, chief executive officer of Minacs, will stay with the combined company and join Concentrix’s senior executive staff. “I am confident that the combination of our capabilities will present an even more compelling value proposition to the marketplace,” Bhalla said. “Across industries, clients can expect our shared vision and strategic scale to help them solve bigger, more complex business challenges.”
Officials at CX Partners and Capital Square Partners could not be immediately reached for comments.
The PE firms had put the company on the block in January. Investment bank Rothschild Inc. was advising the PE firms on the sale. Several US-based BPO firms and a clutch of PE investors, including CVC Capital Partners Ltd and HIG Capital Partners, had expressed interest in buying Minacs,Mint had reported in May.
Minacs was acquired by the current owners from Aditya Birla Nuvo Ltd for $260 million in 2014.
In 2006, TransWorks Information Services Pvt. Ltd, a unit of Aditya Birla Nuvo, had acquired Canadian firm Minacs Worldwide Inc. for about $125 million.
Minacs has 21,000 employees across 35 centres worldwide.
The business process management (BPM) space has attracted interest from global PE and strategic firms in the last couple of years. In April last year, French IT services company Capgemini SA acquired Nasdaq-listed iGate Corp. for $4 billion in cash as a way to strengthen its presence in the Indian and North American market. Global PE fund Apax Partners Llp, which held 28.91% in iGate, generated $1.2 billion from the transaction, more than three times its original investment.
On 5 April, Blackstone India, the Indian arm of global PE fund Blackstone Group Lp, acquired 60.5% stake in Bengaluru-based information technology services provider Mphasis Ltd for $1.1 billion. In September 2015, Blackstone Group repurchased the India-based BPO operations of the UK’s Serco Group Plc. for £250 million, four years after selling the unit.
The BPO space in India has witnessed two PE deals worth $1.2 billion in 2016, compared with eight deals worth $442 million in 2015, a growth of 170%, according to data from research platform VCCEdge.
CX Partners, the home-grown private equity fund launched by former India head of Citi Venture Capital International Ajay Relan, is in the process of exiting its previous investments.
CX Partners plans to part exit its investment in Security and Intelligence Services (India) Ltd through an initial public offering (IPO) of almost Rs.1,000 crore, Mint reported in May. CX Partners is also in talks to sell its stake in surgical equipment maker Sutures India Pvt. Ltd. Thyrocare Technologies, another CX Partners investee firm, went public last month. CX Partners sold the majority of the stake it held in the firm through the IPO.
CX Partners had raised its first fund worth $515 million in 2010.
Source: Mint