REUTERS - Investors cheered U.S. private equity firm Bain Capital Partners' move to buy a 30 percent stake in technology outsourcing services provider Genpact Ltd , sending its shares to their highest in nearly two years.
Bain Capital, co-founded by U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney, will pay about $1 billion, or $14.76 per share, to buy 68 million Genpact shares from General Atlantic and Oak Hill Capital Partners.
The deal will reduce the combined stake of Genpact's two largest stakeholders to about 10 percent from about 40 percent.
"We believe the overhang of a potential secondary offering (due to the end of life of Oak Hill's fund) had capped the (stock) price," William Blair analyst Bhavan Suri wrote in a note.
"The acquisition of 30 percent by Bain with a two-and-a-half year restriction on selling any shares should alleviate much of that overhang," Suri said.
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Genpact, which has a market value of about $3.82 billion, was set up by General Electric Co in 1997 in the north Indian city of Gurgaon to provide back-office services to its group companies. It was spun off as a separate company in 2005.
"Both General Atlantic and Oak Hill Capital were investors for seven years. They helped us transform from a captive (unit) to a now diversified business that does business process management and technology services across the globe," Chief Executive N.V. "Tiger" Tyagarajan told Reuters.
The company has grown five times in size since General Atlantic and Oak Hill came in, Tyagarajan said.
Before the stake sale, Genpact will pay a special dividend of $2.24 per share to all stockholders, including General Atlantic and Oak Hill.
Bain Capital was in advanced talks with the Government of Singapore Investment Corp to make a joint bid for a 40 percent stake in Genpact for $1.5 billion to $2 billion, Reuters had reported earlier this month.
Genpact also forecast full-year revenue of $1.86 billion to $1.9 billion. This came in largely below analyst expectations of $1.89 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
"In spite of the softness in discretionary spend that is there in some parts ... we have done terrifically well in the first half (of the year)," Tyagarajan said.
The company earned an adjusted profit of 32 cents per share on revenue of $467.6 million in the second quarter.
Smaller rival ExlService Holdings Inc posted a better-than-expected quarter on Tuesday helped by demand for its data analytics services and reaffirmed its full-year profit forecast.