Ugam plans tier II city expansions

The centre which can accommodate 500 people over the next 2-3 years, will be the first expansion by the company out side of Mumbai.

"We are looking at opening the centre in an SEZ space in Coimbatore, and hoping this to be operational by the end of the current fiscal. The reason why we chose Coimbatore is that the place is far enough from Mumbai for geographical redundancy. There are a fair number of engineering colleges in the city which can provide us with people with computing blend of mind," Sunil Mirani, CEO Ugam Solutions told Business Standard.

Ugam Solutions employs about 760 people with most of them located in Mumbai. Besides, the company has a small front-end presence in London with a team of about 60 native speaking people. The company intends to use the Coimbatore centre for high-end analytics services.

Apart from expanding operations in the domestic market, Ugam Solutions is also planning to establish a front-end presence in the US, for which the company is considering an acquisition in the range of $8-10 million.

Mirani said the company which had been growing at a CAGR of about 70 per cent over the past three years would part-fund the expansion plans through internal accruals.

"However, if we succeed in identifying a possible acquisition target in the US, we might go for external funding in the range of $10-20 million," he said. The company may go in for multiple options including venture funds, bank loans and debts.

Jointly owned by Avalon Consulting and KVS Group, Ugam Solutions' clientele includes nine of the top 25 market research companies across the world including Harris Interactive.

The size of the Indian market research outsourcing and analytics industry is estimated to be around $300 million, and is growing at 50 per cent year on year basis.

While larger BPO firms including WNS, Genpact, TCS BPO, Wipro and Infosys BPO offers research and analytics as a part of their KPO services, the last couple of years has seen the emergence of many pure-play market research and analytics services firms.

The global survey research market is about $10 billion at present, of which 40 per cent of the works which are more operational in nature are outsourcable.

The operational market research works include designing, conducting and analysing the survey, write the report after analysing the survey, and its interpretation.