The Venture Intelligence Blog

Information Systems changes to Infrastructure Realty When a whole horde of former financial services companies appended "Software Services", "Information Systems" or just "Infosys" to their names, it marked the beginning of the end for the boom in IT services stocks. Now, BSEL Information Systems Limited has informed the stock exchange that it has changed its name to 'BSEL Infrastructure Realty Ltd'. Not sure what to make of this!

Private Equity survey by Businessworld Engineering software specialist Geometric Software, airline and hospitality software maker Kale Consultants, and optical disk manufacturer Moser Baer, are among the few Indian companies in which their private equity backers have made over 10-fold returns, according to a recent Businessworld article on Private Equity investments in India (issue dated August 11, 2003). Click Here to view the full list of the top "multi-bagger" investments. Citibank Private Equity (which invested in I-Flex, Polaris), Electra Partners (Moser Baer), ING Barings (Mphasis-BFL), Draper International (Rediff, Selectica, Prio) rank among funds which have made returns of more than 2.5 times their investments in India. Click Here to view the full list of the top performing funds. Click Here to read tead the full Businessworld article.

Businessworld's BPO Status Report Businessworld magazine did a comprehensive cover story on the BPO industry in its issue dated August 04, 2003. The article covered, among other aspects, statistics on the industry's size, winners & losers, and the sectors which held the most promise. Some extracts: "As on 31 March 2003, the sector employed 171,000 professionals. It has $1 billion invested in it, creating about 100,000 smart cubicles in 7.5 million sq. ft of space. And it generated revenues of $2.3 billion in 2002-03." "The Indian BPO story is replete with such successful examples--and also with abject failures. Around the time OfficeTiger was crafting its success in Chennai, another Chennai-based company, Brigade, was busy writing its own epitaph. Brigade made a series of errors. Soon after it got its first $50-million infusion of capital from General Atlantic Partners, Brigade went on a mad spending spree. By 2001, it was burning cash at ...