Rank - 18 : Fighting Slowdown Blues

While FY10 saw Hinduja Global Solutions (HGSL) record its lowest growth in
its historythanks to the combined effect of the slowdown and its
over-dependence on North Americathe company did continue its expansions. As the
industry in general recognized the superiority of the Philippines over India for
vanilla voice processessomething that HGSL was one of the first company to
recognize way back in 2004 by acquiring a firm thereit opened its second 1,000
seater facility in Manila.

Its long overdue European foray though happened only this year, when this
June it acquired UK based Careline Services, a 1,200 plus people customer
service with annual revenues in excess of GBP 20 mn and some big clients such as
Sky, BT, Unilever, Virgin, Tiscali, Amex, Lloyds TSB, KMV, Pizza Hut and Astra
Zeneca. It also gives HGSL an entry into the government market there as Careline
works with customers such as Central Office of Information, Foreign &
Commonwealth Office, Identity & Passport Service and London Committee of the
Olympic Games.

While things slowed down in general, telecom and technology was the worst
hit. In fact, healthcare revenues as a percentage of total revenue went up
marginally. While customer services revenue grew marginally, tech support and
claims processing revenues grew faster.

With most customers now looking for a mix of IT services and BPOpartially
due to the fact that the BPO units owned by IT firms are doing a hardsellHGSL
realized the virtue of an integrated offering, but instead of going for building
it organically, which is time consuming, or acquiring units, which is costlyit
chose the partnership model. It has partnerships with Astute and Talisma in the
CRM space and ITC Infotech in the IT services space, where it does joint
go-to-market with the partners. Last year, it attributed $4 mn worth of business
to such partnership based sales but expects that to go up considerably this
year.

The company is scouting for acquisitions but CEO Partha Sarkars penchant for
bargain deals may mean that the company would be looking for acquisitions
primarily in onshore locations and not the high valuations prone Indian deal
market, especially the captives wanting to sell.