Aegis to focus on emerging markets

Will explore inorganic route to expand into regions like Korea, Japan, & Malaysia

Aegis, the BPO arm from Essar group, is eyeing organic and inorganic route to expand its presence in emerging market. The company will use part of the $610 million, raised through selling some of its international business, for this expansion.

Aegis, announced the sell-off its business units in the US, Philippines, and Costa Rica to Paris-headquartered Teleperformance for $610 million. The sell-off consisted transfer of 70-80 clients and about 19,000 employees.

"When we had acquired these operations in the US and Philippines, the total business was around $50 million. We have been able to grow to $400 million. Besides it was a mature unit among the Aegis portfolio," said Sandeep Sen, global CEO, Aegis.

 

When asked if the group would sell or look for private equity investment, as stated by the company and the promoters in the past, Sudeep Rungta, board member of Aegis & executive director Essar said, "One of the objective of the Essar Global Fund is value creation, and it can take place in different forms. At this point of time Essar Global Fund and Aegis is focused in growing Aegis presence and expansion."

Aegis will continue to focus in markets like Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Australia, South Africa, Peru, Argentina, Saudi Arabia , UK and India. "We would look for inorganic opportunities too. Especially in regions like Korea, Japan, basically regions in APAC. We are expanding our presence in Middle East. Our Saudi Arabia business is $100 million and we recently opened offices in Dubai," added Sen.

The company is also looking to expand India business. It will hire about 8,000 people for this fiscal and expects India business revenue to grow 30 per cent.

Sen also said that one of the reasons to sell the international business was due to higher component of voice business. "We are committed to voice business. But we want to increase our non-voice business too. Target it to take it up to 40-45 per cent from the present 20 per cent in the next few years," he added.

After the sale of the international units, Aegis revenue is $400 million and has employee headcount of 37,000.