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i-flex plans IPO in fourth quarter

Indian financial software firm i-flex solutions ltd, 48.5 per cent owned by Citigroup, will be ready to go public in the last quarter of the year to March 2002, a top firm official said on Wednesday.

"We plan to be ready by the last quarter of this year and unless the market conditions are really unfavourable we see no problems for the IPO," chief financial officer Deepak Ghaisas told reporters after the opening of a new development centre.

Earlier this month, a senior company official told Reuters the firm had appointed a consortium led by Salomon Smith Barney to decide the timing and size of its IPO aimed at offering liquidity to investors and funds for acquisitions.

i-flex's flagship FLEXCUBE product, which enables automation in banking and finance companies, is one of the world's largest selling back-office banking systems and with its allied products covers over 30 countries.

Ghaisas said he expected the firm to continue to maintain the growth momentum it had achieved in the past two years.

The firm reported a 59 per cent increase in net profit in the year ended March on the back of 56 per cent year-on-year rise in revenues. It said net profit was Rs 1.10 billion and turnover stood at Rs 3.21 billion.

"We expect the revenue growth to continue in line with the trend of the last two years and above the industry average," Ghaisas said.

He said the firm continued to expand its workforce in line with plans and would end the year to March with over 2,300 staff.

The firm, which recently forged an alliance with technology giant IBM Corp to market solutions combining each other's products, said the new software development centre would focus on investment and wealth management solutions.

"The centre will employ over 125 professionals by March 2002 and we expect that in the first year, five per cent of our company revenues will come from this new business area," said NRK Raman, head of the firm's IT Services Division.

The Bangalore-based firm is targeting a share of the $32.6 billion that the global securities services industry is forecast to spend in 2002, as per projections made by the Gartner group.

"Our target clients for the new software services centre are the large financial institutions in the US, Japan and Europe," Raman added.

The Madras centre is the firm's sixth software development facility in India, with the other five spread across Bombay, Bangalore and Pune.

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