BTS Advisors to buy stakes in clutch of SMEs

BTS India Private Equity Fund, floated by the Switzerland-based BTS Investment Advisors, is in talks to pick up stakes in four to five medium-sized enterprises spread across sectors. BTS Investment is a Switzerland- and India-based private equity advisor.

"Due diligence, which in progress for the last one month, is likely to be completed by the fund in another month. Once the deals are finalised, the investments would take place over the next couple of months," said K Srinivas, vice-president of BTS Investment.

He, however, refused to divulge information either about the deal size or the target companies. "It would not be in the fitness of things to reveal anything at the current juncture," he told 'Business Standard'.

With a dedicated corpus of Rs 250 crore, the fund is looking at investing in mid-size companies over the two years. The fund has already invested in the Rs 20-crore Reliable Infotech, a fast-growing auto-component start-up, and hopes to deploy the balance of the corpus over the next two to three years.

The fund, which has already exited eight of its 17 investments at a substantial premium, is unlikely to raise fresh funds for now.

BTS Investment's Swiss Technology Venture Capital Fund has been around since 1998 with a portfolio of 19 companies spread across sectors such as manufacturing, pharma and auto ancillaries. It launched its India Private Equity Fund, a follow-on to the Swiss Tech Fund, in 2006.

The fund looks at deals with a ticket size ranging between $2 million and $5 million. It takes a significant minority stake of 20-25 per cent in the companies concerned, hand-holds them till they achieve a critical mass, before finally exiting the businesses.

The investment philosophy of the PE fund consists in identifying companies with a sound management and sustainable, scalable business models within sectors that are both export-driven and domestically growth-oriented.

CDC Group, the UK government-backed private equity emerging markets fund of funds investor, in April 2007 committed $20 million to the India fund.