The Hindu Business Line : Cambridge Solutions eyes acquisitions

Cambridge Solutions Ltd was formed with the recent merger of the $75-million services firm Scandent Solutions Corp and the $200-million BPO firm, Cambridge Services Holdings.

Mr Satyen Patel, Vice-Chairman, Cambridge Solutions Ltd, said the company had recently raised $60 million, of which $30 million would be used to fund inorganic growth and the rest to retire high cost debts.

ICICI Ventures has picked up close to 10 per cent stake by pumping in $55 million, while the remaining $5 million was raised from the Scandent Group, Mauritius.

Cambridge Solutions is targeting revenues of billion dollars in three to five years, Mr Patel said. "As a combined entity, we may reach a turnover of $750-800 million on our own, but we have to depend on inorganic growth to meet the rest," he said, adding it was on the lookout for potential targets.

Declining to spell out a timeframe for the acquisition, Mr Patel said, "We are not going to sit idle on the $30-million cash chest." "We are looking at almost all the major geographies," Mr Patel said, adding that potential new areas of expansion may include telecom. The company has a strong presence in healthcare, banking, financial services and insurance, and logistics.

Post-merger, Cambridge Solutions sees major potential to cross-sell its services to the existing clientele. "We plan to go in for `reverse mining' of the clientele, where we would be cross-selling both IT and BPO services," Mr Patel said. This implies that the company would sell IT services to the BPO clients of the erstwhile Cambridge and vice versa. "We are finding it easier to sell IT services to the BPO clients," Mr Patel said.

In the last few weeks, two IT services clients - - Engelhard and Cushman Wakefield - - signed up for Cambridge's BPO services.

Cambridge, which offers high-end BPO services such as transaction processing, recently won a three-year $38-million deal from New South Wales Work Authority for processing workers compensation claims. Mr Patel said there were more such deals in the pipeline.

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