WNS eyes small ticket buyout in healthcare or finance space

Business process management (BPM) major WNS today said it will be looking at a small-ticket acquisition in healthcare or finance sector to enhance its capabilities.
"We are also looking at longer-term mergers and acquisitions and tuck in kind of acquisitions that will essentially create new enhanced capability for the company," the NYSE-listed company's chief executive Keshav Murugesh told PTI on the sidelines of Nasscom summit here.
He said the acquisitions would be in "sunrise" sectors like healthcare or finance.
"It is more around technology, and more about enhancing capability, and our interest is going to be in new sunrise industries of the future, particularly, the healthcare, insurance, finance and accounting areas," he said.

Murugesh also hinted that the proposed acquisition will be a low-ticket one, saying WNS does not want to do a "big bang," but will prefer a "tuck in" acquisition.
"Ticket size does not matter, what matters is the quality of the acquisition from a domain and technological point of view. Ideally, it would be something in USD 20 million range. It could also be something in the USD 70-100 million range. But it will not be a big bang acquisition as our interest is more strategic capability," he said.

WNS has cash reserves of over USD 160 million, which can come in handy to fund the acquisition, he said.

It is also working to be debt-free in a "reasonably good time", he said, adding that this should not be taken as a resolve to be debt-free always.
When asked about the outlook for the company that operates 37 centres in 10 countries employing 27,000 people, Murugesh declined to comment saying it would spell it out in April after its quarterly results.
Regarding their outlook on hiring, he emphasised that in the past few years, the hiring growth has been trailing revenue and profit growth.
"Our message really is driving non-linear models of growth where revenue and headcount are getting de-linked. So we are growing revenue faster than the headcount," he said.

Murugesh, who also heads a sub-committee for the BPM sector at Nasscom, said he is concerned after recent incidents of violence against women like the ones in New Delhi and Rohtak.
"We are extremely concerned when there is any incident that impacts India as a nation. International companies outsource their work into our country and therefore we are always concerned about these incidents," he said, adding the BPM industry has 40 per cent women in workforce.