BANGALORE, MARCH 6: Bangalore Softsell Ltd is all set to float an IPO (Rs 5 share at a premium of Rs 27.50) to mop up Rs 9.75 crore, according to the company's managing director S Ragothaman. The company plans to raise money through the IPO as well as private placement. Of the total fund requirement of Rs 16.45 crore, Rs 9.75 crore would be raised from the market, Rs 5 crore (or 6 lakh shares) through private placements and an additional Rs 1.7 crore will come from the State Bank of India as term loan.The funds from the issue will be used towards infrastructure requirements of the company - that includes the setting up of a new office at Bangalore, beefing up manpower (from 50 to 200) and opening two offices in the US and Europe. While SBI Caps are the lead managers to the issue, Karvy Consultants are the registrars. The issue is expected to open in April 2000. The stock will be listed on the Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Chennai stock exchanges.
Bangalore Softsell has drawn up a strategic expansion and market focus plans for `Lemit' - a Cobol-to-Visual Basic process migration tool developed in-house. ``The market for Cobol conversions currently stands at close to $ 50 billion with over 150 billion Cobol sources in existence. We are looking at tapping this potential in the UK and US markets with our Lemit migration tool,'' Ragothaman said. To this end, the company has already tied up with New Planet Solutions (NPS) in the UK and the US-based Web Vision for Lemit-focussed marketing. The company is also anoffshore development associate of NPS for the Surveyor II asset management solution and another UK-based share brokerage firm for an `online share package' development.
Plans are also on for strategic investments (anywhere between $ 50,000 to $200,000) in two US-based start-ups, he said. The companies would focus on marketing Lemit in the US, he added. ``Once we enter the UK and US markets the company is also looking at focusing on the Indian segment for similar Cobol conversions using Lemit. We have already developed a Cobol-to-ASPconversion and a Cobol to Java solution is in the pipeline,'' Ragothaman said. As per the projections, starting June 2000, close to six large overseas projects for Lemit were expected per year. All Lemit projects would be Bangalore-centric and managed on servers hosted in the Bangalore office, he said. An Indian and US patent for the product was also being planned, he added. On the revenue front, Ragothaman said that the company was looking at Rs 8 crore next year as compared toRs 3.5 crore this fiscal.
Copyright © 2000 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.