Tech Mahindra, India's fifth largest IT services firm, is planning to hive off the employment jobs marketplace – Saral Rozgar – into a separate firm. The company is also scouting for strategic investors, who can invest either partially or acquire the entire stake in the firm.

Further, the company is also exploring avenues like private equity investments, or equity shareholding by the management and employees, among others.

“The process is on for incorporating Saral Rozgar as a standalone legal entity, and we are hopeful of completing the entire process in this financial year. We decided to hive this off as this could be a large company doing large business, and can bring in value for the whole group,” said Saral Rozgar founder and CEO, Vivek Chandok, told BusinessLine in an interaction.

Following the proposed hive-off, it continue to function as a separate company under the brand name ‘Saral Rozgar’. Tech Mahindra has completed the formalities of appointing advisors for the spin off, he said, declining to name the advisors.

Saral Rozgar was incubated by Tech Mahindra in 2012 as value added services provider to telecom operators, and a year later the company became a direct-to-consumer services firm by launching a recharge card. Till date, Tech Mahindra has invested about $10 million in Saral Rozgar.

Now, Saral Rozgar is a multi-lingual platform that allows candidates to explore job vacancies through mobile phones, text services and voice calls in over 10 Indian languages. At present, there are about 6 million job applicants registered with the company.

Saral Rozgar, which has about 300 employees, has presence across 300 cities.

New company

In January 2016, a new company – Tech Mahindra Growth Factories Ltd (TMGFL) – was formed as part of its first step of hiving it as an independent company, and Saral Rozgar was moved into this company.

Now an incubator, TMGFL also houses Tech Mahindra’s other businesses – such as its mobile wallet MoboMoney, and education venture.

“The process of valuing the company is on,” Chandok said, who declined to comment on the investments the company is seeking.

Even though there is no near-term plan for an Initial Public Offering (IPO), the company will consider public listing after it gets 100 million job seekers in the next five years.

“We are not ruling out an IPO as an exit strategy for investors, but not in the near-term,” he added.

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