Source: www.business-standard.com

Having short-listed three bidders for its Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) unit after the first bidding round, the sale of the BPO business, run by Citigroup Global Services (formerly e-Serve), is expected to fetch around Rs. 3,200-crore for the group, which will make it the largest deal in the domestic BPO space.

While IBM, Automatic Data Processing (ADS), Infosys, EDS, Capgemini and private equity players, such as, Blackstone and General Atlantic, all expressed interest they are no longer in the race. It has now been left to FirstSource, WNS and Genpact to battle it out, sources close to the development confirm.

While Citigroup’s spokesperson declined to comment, investment bankers say Citigroup might not sell its entire 100% stake in the BPO business, a non-core area, in one go. In all probability, it will sell 80% to one of the successful bidders, while selling the remaining 20% at the company’s listing.

Changing its name to e-Serve last November, Citigroup Global Services employs close to 8,000-people in Mumbai and Chennai, and consolidated its holdings in the BPO firm from 44.4% to 92.26%, three years ago. Currently, it is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Citigroup.

So far, the largest deal in the BPO space was the recent sale of Intelnet by Barclays and HDFC to Blackstone for Rs. 840-crore.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 28th, 2007 at 12:02 am and is filed under Outsourcing News and Top Outsourcing deals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.