SUNIL RAJANALA
HYDERABAD: Barely 20 months after announcing a $50 million commitment and buying stake in Brigade Corporation, a leading private equity investment firm, General Atlantic Partners, has sold its position in the outsourced customer support provider early this month.
In an interesting development, the management of Brigade Corporation led by its chief executive officer and chairman of the board of directors, Sri Dasari, has bought out the entire stake of General Atlantic Partners held in Brigade Corporation for an undisclosed amount. Mr Dasari refused to divulge the amount paid to acquire the stake citing a non-disclosure agreement.
Before the transaction, General Atlantic had 98.6% stake in Brigade Corporation. The buyout also includes the acquisition of Brigade’s Indian operations in Chennai and Hyderabad. Brigade India has 450 employees, with 250 employees in Chennai and the balance in Hyderabad offering customer support for insurance, financial services and technical verticals.
In December 2001, General Atlantic Partners had announced its commitment of $50 million in Brigade Corporation. Prior to the announcement, the investment firm had put in $35 million in mid-2001. Following the announcement, General Atlantic invested $15 million out of the $50 million commitment.
The process of negotiating, which went for nearly three weeks, culminated on August 7, with Mr Dasari buying out the stake of General Atlantic Partners through a separate company IT Gurus, an IT consulting firm. The Chicago-based IT Gurus is a six-year old firm owned by Mr Dasari, who came on to Brigade’s Board during April 2002. Speaking to ET, Mr Dasari said the company would be hiring 250 resources over the next one year, while consolidating the operations through restructuring.
“The entire focus will now move from US centric to India centric. We will leverage on the India delivery centre model to focus entirely on business transaction services and drop the acquired, transformation and leveraged (ATL) business model,” he said.
As a fall out of the development, the US operations will be pruned from 28 employees to eight. The relationship management, sales and business development teams will be based in the US, while the rest of the functions spanning delivery, quality, HR, finance and accounts will be based out of India. Brigade is also moving out its headquarters from San Francisco to Chicago.
General Atlantic is a leading private equity investment firm focused exclusively on information technology, process outsourcing and communications investments. In India, the investment firm has interests in the BPO outfit of Patni and also Daksh.
About Brigade Corporation
- Brigade is a leading provider of business transaction services and customer relationship management solutions to Global 1000 corporations.
- Brigade’s global service delivery model, including large-scale operations in India, leverages global labor markets and world-class outsourcing process expertise to provide multi-national corporations with high quality business transaction services outsourcing and customer relationship management options.
- Brigade dramatically improves business processes while delivering them at substantially lower costs. See: www.brigade.com.
