Indian Outsourcers Warm Up To AcquisitionsIndian Outsourcers Warm Up To Acquisitions

Trouble At The Top
Among India's top six outsourcing companies, Satyam is the only one looking vulnerable to a takeover, having hired investment banks to find and sort through potential suitors. The recently revealed accounting scandal has left the company on shaky financial ground, having to deal with executive turnover, a government investigation, and the possibility of investor lawsuits. Dubbed "India's Enron," it began with former CEO Ramalinga Raju admitting to inflating revenue and profits and falsifying about $1 billion of cash on the company's books. The former CEO and other former top officers face criminal charges, and the government has seized control of the board of directors.

"The extent of the inherent damage is still unknown," says Gartner's Iyengar. Infosys has said it isn't interested in acquiring Satyam, and no big players have publicly shown much interest. "But Satyam is still a reasonably sized provider with a strong value proposition," Iyengar says, so when things settle, other buyers may emerge.

For the most part, the large Indian IT services firms are more interested in expanding on their own or by buying smaller players than by merging with each other.

In addition to cultural resistance to acquisitions, the larger Indian outsourcers tend to be fairly evenly matched in the skills and services they offer, making it hard to find big, complementary acquisition targets, Iyengar says. So instead of looking at each other, they tend to seek out boutique consulting firms and niche outsourcers that bring with them existing customers and revenue streams. Buying the Indian operations from would-be customers--"captive" operations--will likely continue to be one of the most popular ways to get both industry-specific knowledge and a top customer.

That was the case with the two units Citigroup recently sold off. They were particularly attractive because they came with built-in revenue streams from having Citigroup as their first customer.

Indian outsourcers also may want to buy their way into greater onshore presence in the United Kingdom or the United States, says Ross Tisnovsky, IT outsourcing analyst at Everest Research Institute. Wipro did that with a major deal for Infocrossing. But the only reason to merge big players like Tata and Wipro would be to get bigger, and "that by itself is not usually a reason to acquire," Tisnovsky says. There might be some consolidation among some of the small to midsize outsourcing operations, he adds.

Midsize Indian outsourcer Patni, with revenue of $542 million through its first three quarters of this fiscal year, has been pursuing a strategy of "very selective acquisitions" to gain entry into markets where it wants a stronger presence, says Tony Viola, VP of marketing at Patni Americas. It bought into IT services for life sciences with the 2007 acquisition of New Jersey-based Taratec. Patni has also acquired a telecommunications specialty with the acquisition of Logan Orviss, based in Monaco, and Cymbal in California, and it moved into product engineering with the purchase of Massachusetts-based ZAiQ, all since 2004.

Acquisition Disruption

5 Big Deals

Recent Purchases
Of Note

1. HCL Buys Axon
The $811 million purchase of U.K. SAP consultancy closed in December and is the largest buy to date by an Indian outsourcer.

2. Wipro Buys Infocrossing
The $548 million purchase of the U.S. data center operator in 2007 strengthened Wipro's infrastructure offerings.

3. TCS Buys Citigroup Unit
The $505 million purchase of the Citi BPO unit in December let Citi shed 12,000 employees, while hiring TCS as a contractor.

4. Wipro Buys Citigroup Tech Services
For $127 million, Wipro gets Citi's offshore IT group, along with a six-year contract worth at least $500 million to provide services back to Citi.

5. Patni Buys Taratec
Patni's 2007 $27.2 million purchase of life-sciences IT consulting firm follows other vertical IT buys in telecom and product engineering.

For customers, the potential for disruption from a takeover depends largely on the nature of the relationship. A big customer of a small firm can exert a lot of control over that firm. That influence is diluted when it's acquired, says Gartner's Iyengar, citing Capgemini's acquisition two years ago of Kanbay, a Chicago consultancy with offshore operations in India. "The deeper the relationship and the more entangled your business is with the provider," the more likely an acquisition will bring significant change, he says.

If you judge the risk and consequences of your supplier being acquired to be significant, then you need to have a contingency plan, he says.

Mergers and acquisitions among outsourcers can have positive consequences for customers, too. Businesses that outsource work to augment their staff benefit from the larger pool of resources that an acquisition makes available, says Everest's Tisnovsky. Companies looking to outsource work also might find that the range of services an outsourcer can offer expands as the result of an acquisition.

What's Ahead
While they may not be targeting each other, the major Indian outsourcers have been competing aggressively for the best acquisitions. To make the Axon acquisition, HCL outbid Infosys' initial $753 million offer, a rare bidding war for the industry.

Worldwide, M&A activity among IT services providers has been accelerating: There were only 13 acquisitions globally by multinational IT services providers in 2004, Everest says, compared with 27 in the first three quarters of 2008. The larger Indian IT outsourcing companies accounted for eight of the 27 acquisitions in the first three quarters of 2008, compared with two of the 13 in 2004.

Tisnovsky expects acquisitions by Indian firms to continue as these companies get more mature and find it increasingly difficult to grow organically. With profitability declining, he says, Indian outsourcers "are going to need to turn some of that cash into operational improvements, and there will be forces inside of these companies competing for cash." But the strongest are likely to selectively acquire as well.