Chennai BPO firm eyes buyouts

Office Tiger, the Chennai-based BPO company, is looking at a series of small acquisitions in six months and has chalked out a budget in excess of $30 million for this.

"We are looking at acquiring companies which will complement our business and should make an announcement about the first acquisition in a month's time. We have zeroed in on companies both inside and outside the country," said Joseph M Sigelman, co-chief executive officer.

The acquisitions are mainly to increase the scale of their business and have a larger service offering for their present clients.

Office Tiger is using the $50 million that it raised from Francisco Partners recently to finance the investment for the acquisitions.

The company offers 'judgement dependent services' in equity analysis, legal research and finance and accounting to corporations and professional service firms in US, Europe and Asia.

"OTH, our joint venture(JV) with Hildebrandt International is working well for us and is promising to yield a dozen clients," added Sigelman.

The JV was announced in June this year with Hildebrandt, the top legal consulting firm in the US and provides services to law firms, corporate and government legal departments.

"Other than the obvious reason of short supply to the overwhelming demand in the BPO industry, employees leave an organisation because of faulty HR policy execution and poor middle management. We have worked hard in this area and have managed to bring down our rate of attrition to a miserly 8 per cent," remarked Sigelman. The average attrition rate in the BPO industry is estimated to be around 30-35 per cent.

Office Tiger currently has facilities in the New York City, London and in Chennai and has expectations to grow from the current 2,000 employees to 4,000 by the end of 2005. About 75-80 per cent of the employees will be based out of India.