NTT Com to acquire 74% stake in Netmagic Solutions

Japan-headquartered NTT Communications Corporation announced that it will acquire 74% stake of Netmagic Solutions, provider of datacenter services in India. The acquisition is subject to the approval of relevant authorities in India. 

The financial details of the deal were not available. This acquisition also gave an exit route to all the existing venture capital investors. Nexus Venture Partners, Nokia Growth Partners, Cisco Systems, Fidelity International have all exited the company. 

Mumbai-based Netmagic had raised around Rs 70 crore in series C funding from Nokia Growth Partners and Cisco Systems along with a follow on investment from Fidelity International and Nexus Venture Partners in 2010. In 2008 it had raised around $13.5 million from NVP and Fidelity. In 2000 the company had raised around Rs 18 crore from eVentures. eVentures was later acquired by NVP. 

"This acquisition enhances our global status as the ICT partner of choice, including now in India, one of the key areas of our future growth. By leveraging the complementary strengths of both companies together with the continued leadership of Sharad Sanghi as CEO of Netmagic, we will accelerate enhancement of our global cloud services for the provision of high-quality ICT services,” said Katsumi Nakata, Senior Vice President of NTT Communications. 

The addition of Netmagic Solutions’ datacenter services and sites will expand NTT Com’s capability to provide one-stop ICT solutions in the fast-growing Indian market, as well as accelerate its offering of globally seamless cloud services through expanded ICT infrastructure Asia-wide. 

Netmagic Solutions, currently operates seven datacenters in major Indian cities such as Mumbai, Chennai, Noida (Delhi-NCR) and Bangalore. It provides services such as colocation and managed hosting to more than 1,000 customers, as well as ISP and cloud services to many other customers. 

"This alliance will help Netmagic to leverage NTT Com’s global network and datacenter footprint for customers. The partnership will also help us strengthen our growth plans in the Indian sub-continent and globally, while NTT Com’s global customers in India can benefit from Netmagic’s expertise and leadership position in the managed IT hosting and cloud services market," said Sharad Sanghi, Founder & CEO of Netmagic Solutions. 

With this acquisition NTT yet again increases its India footprint. Last year NTT Data Corp had acquired Hyderabad-based Intelligroup Inc. for $200 million. It was also in talks to acquire the Indian IT services firm Patni Computer Systems but the deal could not go through. Eventually Patni was acquired by Nasdaq listed iGate and PE Apax for $1.2 billion. 

In a press statement, NTT Com Group said that it will continue to build global strengths with a special focus on Asia, aiming to achieve global sales revenues of at least 1.5 trillion yen, including a doubling of ex-Japan sales revenues, by 2015.