Investors like General Electric (GE), General Atlantic, Oak Hill Capital Partners and Wells Fargo & Company have offloaded their stake in India’s largest business process outsourcing (BPO) company Genpact. Genpact will sell these 28 million common shares to the public through a secondary public offering.
“In connection with the offering, certain selling shareholders have granted to the underwriters an option to purchase up to 4.2 million additional shares. Genpact will not receive any proceeds from the offering,” said the BPO in an SEC filing.
“The investors are probably looking at more liquidity. Genpact will now be more publically held,” said a company spokesperson.
Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are lead book-running managers of the offering.
"The investors have been diluting their stakes but this time all of them have done this together. Genpact was no longer a strategic asset for GE and most probably GE was squeezing them hard as Genpact is the biggest customer. As for the other investors, they had invested in the BPO before it went public but now they have to give the returns to their investors. Moreover, value creation and capital appreciation have already happened," said Alok Shende, principal analyst and founder director of consulting firm Ascentius.
Analysts, however, suspect that this could be a precursor to some deal happening. In fact, there were reports of discussions between private equity investors in Genpact and IT services major Cognizant Technology Services, exploring the possibility of a stake sale.
Genpact, Bengal Aerotropolis ink 5-year contract
Genpact and Bengal Aerotropolis Projects (BAPL), a specialist company engaged in the development of aerotropolis projects in India, have signed a five-year contract for BAPL’s information technology (IT) operations in India. Genpact will provide BAPL with a hosted IT application and infrastructure services model to help develop aerotropolis projects and scale operations without undertaking large capital investments in IT.