Fortune Informatics makes $3-million overseas plans

Plans to have presence in Europe, Middle East & Asia Pacific region

Hyderabad-based Fortune Informatics Limited (FIL), a software products development enterprise, plans to invest $3 million in the next 12 months for having a presence in Europe, Middle East and the Asia Pacific region.

Speaking to Business Standard, C K Shastri, managing director of Fortune Informatics Limited, said that the company plans to expand the support, sales and marketing operations to other countries as well as to other parts within the country by having regional support hubs because of growth in sales.

"The market potential in the banking, insurance and telecom space is growing rapidly and since our products are doing well in these sectors we want to have the support teams in these regions," Shastri said. According to him, the company has not yet decided whether it would raise the money from internal accruals or by debt and a decision in this regard is expected to be made by the end of the current financial year," Shastri said.

FIL is also looking at increasing the headcount from the present 140 employees in India to around 200 by the end of the current calendar year.

Shastri said that though the first two quarters of the current financial year were not very impressive, the company expects a significant growth in the remaining two quarters. The company for the first two quarters had a turnover of around Rs 1.3 crore.

"We have acquired some big foreign clients in the telecom sector who have started using our products and we expect significant revenues from these companies, which would have a substantial contribution towards the increase in FIL's turnover by end of the fiscal," Shastri said.

The company recently acquired a mobile service provider in Iceland, Siminn Limited, and a few other companies in Europe, Kuwait and Cyprus have made enquiries, he said.

"In the next 12 months, we expect to have 100 per cent market share in the telecom sector in the country for our flagship product ReportSuite, which works with various billing applications," he said.

According to him, ReportSuite is a comprehensive document design tool that accepts variable data as input and applies process logic to transform the data into an agile document for automated multi-channel delivery.

The product is available in five different versions and the company plans to launch a new version 'ReportSuite Print Professional' that would cater to the needs of the printing vendors across the world. The new version is expected to be released in the market in the next couple of weeks.

FIL is also looking at releasing a new version of its integrated document management and workflows solution, Web BIZ, and also an e-mail archival product by mid- February.

The company, which has ventured into the banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) sector, has recently acquired some clients in the Middle East, Spain, Iceland and Cyprus.