WHCL AXON TO PURSUE DEALS WORTH USD 1.2 BILLION

New Delhi
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BCountry's fifth largest software exporter HCL Technologies today completed the acquisition of UK-based firm Axon in a 441 million-pound deal and the new entity would pursue deals worth 1.2 billion dollars.

Talking about the largest acquisition by an Indian IT firm overseas, HCL Technologies CEO Vineet Nayar said, "The current quarter is going to be the biggest quarter for us in term of contract value. The funnel size -- deals to be persuaded for HCL Axon -- is 1.2 billion dollar".

Post-acquisition, HCL Axon would headed by Steve Cardell, the President of Axon.

The independent entity would have 4,500 consultants, which includes 1,700 people involved in the SAP practice in HCL, Nayar said.

"The addressable market size for SAP is 26 billion dollar of which offshore market space is 7.5 billion dollar. However, the share of Indian players is only 1.5 billion dollar... so there is a huge opportunity that exists," he added.

Last week, a UK court had cleared the deal for Axon. Earlier, HCL had edged out Infosys Technologies in a highly competitive bid. Infosys had made a cash offer of 407.1 million pound for buying out Axon.

Nayar also said that in this quarter HCL has bagged deals worth over one billion dollars.

"The merger of Axon and HCL SAP practice presents a great opportunity to bring new capabilities to the market with a truly global delivery model providing the full life cycle suite of services," Nayar said.

"Enterprise Application Services (EAS), the sector in which HCL AXON operates, constitutes 11 per cent of HCLs revenue. The combination of the two will create a business accounting for 25 per cent of HCLs revenues," Ram Krishna, Corporate Vice President and Head - Enterprise Application Services, HCL said.