The Hindu Business Line : NIS Sparta plans China foray

NIS Sparta Ltd, the New Delhi-based performance enhancement solutions company that was recently acquired by Reliance Industries, is exploring opportunities in the Chinese market. Towards this it has forged a strategic alliance with its former majority stakeholder NIIT, which already has a presence in the region.

NIS Sparta, whose overseas operations include a BPO academy in Sri Lanka and offices in West Asia and Egypt, is looking to bag contracts in China to train in the areas of insurance, FMCG, telecom and front-end financial services. It expects to be in China by October-November this year.

Mr Sanjeev Duggal, who continues to be CEO and Managing Director and is the minority stakeholder in the company, however, refused to divulge the size of acquisition and the stakeholding percentages. However, he emphasised, that NIS would continue to service its 500 company clients outside the Reliance Group, even though some of them may be the parent company's competitors. "For Reliance, the teams will be totally separate. We are setting up two verticals right now, one that will take care of its telecom business and the other petroleum. For telecom, we will be expanding geographically to set up 110 training centres in cluster towns. And in line with Reliance's expansion plans, we too will ramp up to eventually include hub and spoke training models in 569 towns across the country. For petroleum, the expansion is to be state-wise to include 12 training headquarters in 12 States.''

Reliance, that plans to increase its presence in telecom, petroleum retailing and other retailing, has obviously identified a synergy with NIS Sparta's training expertise in these areas and will now leverage it to train as many as 1,00,000 people across the country.

Mr Duggal, who was in search of a strategic investor to enable the company to grow, found that Reliance had a "commonality of vision and goals". However, for him the eventual aim is to be a listed entity in the next few years.

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