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Strategies & Market Trends : India Coffee House -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mohan Marette who wrote (4209)	5/5/1999 11:13:00 AM
From: Mohan Marette	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12475

INTERVIEW-India NIIT shops for Net firm niit.com NEW DELHI, May 5 (Reuters) - Indian software major NIIT Ltd, searching to acquire a U.S.-based firm, is interested in a networking company with a strong orientation towards Internet technologies, its managing director said. ''We are looking for a company which is doing fixed-time, fixed-price client-server work, going towards the Internet,'' Rajendra Pawar told Reuters on Wednesday in an interview on the sidelines of the launch of an information technology policy by the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. NIIT, which is India's leader in the booming software education sector, also has interests in consultancy and service exports related to software. Pawar said the planned acquisition, for which the company has a budget of around $100 million, was aimed at tapping into the higher prices commanded by U.S.-based companies. ''When you look at an American software company in America, the prices they get will always be more,'' he said. NIIT officials say they are looking at ''U.S. facing prices and India facing costs'' as Indian costs are only around a third compared with the United States, for similar work. Going by industry trends, a firm with an annual revenue of around $40 million can be obtained for $100 million, Pawar added. Earlier this month, NIIT said it expected to complete the acquisition by the end of 1999. India's ICICI Group was named the advisor and global investment banker Goldman Sachs (GS - news) as a partner in the acquisition process. NIIT currently had no plans to go in for an American Depositary Receipt (ADR) issue, Pawar said. ''We have not put the ADR thing (proposal) on the table,'' Pawar said. ''There is no plan now,'' he said. NIIT officials have in the past said they considered an ADR issue but Pawar said the company had no need to raise ADR funds at the moment as finances for the U.S. acquisition had been arranged through an alternate route. biz.yahoo.com