Mahindra Satyam Australia plans to make $50-100mn acquisitions

Mahindra Satyam's Australia unit plans to make acquisitions worth $50-100 million and become a $750-million company by 2015, a media report has said.

"We're on the lookout for major acquisitions, anywhere from $50 million to $100 million. The treasure trove is reasonably big and Australia is a big market for us on a worldwide basis," Mahindra Satyam Head (Australia and New Zealand operations) Venki Prathivadi said in an interview to 'The Australian'.

Earlier this month, the diversified Mahindra Group announced the long-awaited merger of Mahindra Satyam with its another technology arm Tech Mahindra in an all-share deal that would create India's fifth largest software firm with an estimated annual revenue of about $2.4 billion.

Speaking on the Australia and New Zealand operations, he said, "Our business is one of the most profitable in the Mahindra Satyam group. With the profits that we have generated and the growth standards that we have here, we're looking for acquisitions in banking and financial services, healthcare, mining."

The company is also looking at ramping up hiring with special focus on building domain skills, he added.

"Business had never been better, and it had even cracked the lucrative federal government market. By 2015, the goal is to have 5,000 employees and the objective is to be a $750 million company," Prathivadi said.

"We doubled in revenues over the last three years and the objective is to double again in the next three years."

After the merger with Tech Mahindra is completed this year, 80 per cent of the employees would cater to Australian customers, it would have 2,250 staff in Australia and New Zealand.

Despite troubled times, the company added 15 new customers in one year's time, the report quoted him as saying.

"We've set ourselves a goal of finding one new  customer every month," he said, adding, "This is a local target...It's a goal I set. We've been doing very well with existing business, but we had to do this in terms of real recovery.

Major customers include Qantas and National Australia Bank".

Prathivadi said that Satyam was working with unnamed Canberra-based companies to deliver services to public-sector users. The company also aims to hire at least 100 people to be based in Canberra.

He said an aversion to using India-based IT outsourcing companies was changing in Canberra, due to the "competitive advantage that we bring".

Prathivadi claimed that one of Satyam's strongest weapons was its ability to deliver quality work for 30 per cent less than its rivals and that people with SAP, Microsoft and Oracle technologies would be highly sought after by Satyam.

It hopes to dip into a "reasonably big" treasure trove to acquire local companies but not necessarily in the IT space.