Dsq Promoters Dispel Divestment Rumours

The management of DSQ Software, the Chennai-based software company have strongly denied rumours of any foreign player picking up a stake in the company. The scrip has been in the limelight over the past few trading sessions on talks of Barings Private Equity Fund picking up an equity stake in DSQ, as the fund had earlier done in the case of BFL Software.

The DSQ scrip closed on the BSE yesterday at Rs 286.90 and on the NSE at Rs 286.35. The scrip has posted a gain of nearly 35 per cent over the past two weeks, since August 17, when it was being quoted at around Rs 210 levels. Last week, the scrip had crossed Rs 300 mark on the BSE and NSE, touching Rs 314.40 and Rs 320.75, respectively.

 

Answering to a faxed questionnaire, R Gopal, GM, Corporate Communications told Business Standard: "We are not in talks with any foreign funds for offloading any stake of the promoter or otherwise. The company is also not considering foreign equity participation at all." The focus areas of the company are enterprise resource planning, healthcare and web-enabled applications. The company has established new centres for SAP implementation at Calcutta, a BaaN implementation centre at Chennai and is in the process of expanding the existing ECC centre at Bangalore. This apart it also has offices in Germany and Australia.

The company has been assigned SEI-CMM level4(Software Engineering Institute-Capability Maturity Model) by the Carnegie Mellon University which rates computer firms on the basis of their capabilities DSQ Software and Infosys Technologies are the only other companies in India which have been assigned a similar level across all the departments. Wipro is the only company with a higher level(level 5-the highest), but it is only for the R&D department of the company.

Market sources said that foreign funds have been regular buyers t the counter over the past couple of weeks. They added that Baring Private Equity Fund has also made some investment purchases at the counter. This had given rise to speculation that they could be in talks with the company to pick up an equity stake. The rumours doing the round were the company would either divest their holding or issue preference share to the foreign player at a rate of Rs 400 per share.