Bartronics woos VCs to raise Rs 20cr

Rs 12.5-cr company expects turnover to touch Rs 50 cr this fiscal

Bartronics India Ltd, the leading provider of automatic identification and data capture (AIDC) technologies in the Indian market, is in talks with venture capital funds to raise close to Rs 20 crore.

The company is also understood to be simultaneously evaluating the option of going in for an initial public offering.

Speaking to Business Standard, Bartronics India managing director Sudhir Rao said that the funds raised would be deployed to expand business operations, increase investment in research and development initiatives apart from retiring high cost debt.

"We are in talks with some private equity players to raise funds. This apart, we are also mulling the option of going in for an initial public offering and are being advised by Karvy Consultants on that," Rao said. The fund raising exercise is expected to be completed over the next 90 days.

Rao, who is a professional manager does not hold a stake in the company. The original promoters have a holding of 38 per cent, IDBI has about 20 per cent while a set of individual investors hold another 42 per cent.

The Rs 12.5-crore company is riding a boom in the demand for its solutions and is expecting a huge turnover jump "� between Rs 50 crore and Rs 75 crore "� this fiscal.

"All the leading companies in India are our customers and we see the demand for our solutions grow exponentially in the next couple of years," Rao said.

Marquee customers include Tata Steel, HLL, ITC Group, Dr Reddy's, Compaq, General Motors, Hyundai, TVS Group, Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams, and Mercedes Benz. Bartronics, which kicked off operations in 1989, has moved towards offering the second generation AIDC technologies, which can be used to address applications like bar coding, magnetic strips, smart cards, proximity cards, biometrics and radio frequency identification .

The AIDC solutions can be used to offer applications like time and attendance registers, access control, job costing, canteen management, asset tracking, production tracking, warehouse management, inventory control, document tracking, route distribution and goods control and despatch management.

The company expects to utilise part of the funds raised to pay off about Rs 3.5 crore of high cost debt contracted from IDBI, apart from expanding operations to Southeast Asia and the Middle East. It already has a presence in the Saarc region with offices in Bangladesh, Mauritius and Colombo.

The company expects its RFID (radio frequency identification devices) to propel growth in the coming years. RFID solutions can be deployed in container tracking, vehicle tracking, toll gate management, access control and ladle tracking amongst other uses.

RFID devices use identification tags with microchips embedded in them. These chips emanate signals that uniquely identify them and by affixing these chips to any object, it can be identified and tracked.