Saltflow, Inc., a Dubai, United Arab Emirates-based group, announced today that the company has definitive plans to exit the Information Technology (IT) outsourcing business by mid-2012. The company has strong technology operations globally which are now controlled by a Moscow subsidiary, but those are exclusively focused on highly-scalable consumer finance, mobile and data solutions on the Internet. With slower growth forecasts on the IT outsourcing front, the company is looking to split and sell off its Washington, D.C. services operations.
“Our Washington, D.C.-based outsourcing arm has been performing slower than we expected. I attribute that more to the lack of management interest than anything inherently wrong with the business itself. We may come back with an acquisitions-driven strategy in perhaps 2-3 years,” said Zubair Nazir, Vice President of Technology at Saltflow. “We will definitely not be selling the core international entities and infrastructure that are controlled by the Washington, D.C. company. Infrastructure retention is critical to successfully running some of our Internet-driven models in many of the countries in which the company operates. It will likely be the service-focused units only, but exactly what we are selling is yet to be determined,” Nazir added.
Executive Chairman Arif Ayub outlined a clear strategy for how the proposed unit sell-offs of the subsidiary will proceed. “We must get the right bid for the exit. If we have to delay the sale a few months in order to obtain capital injections from us internally and from some private equity firms in Asia, we will take that path in order to sell at about $100-200 million rather than accept the $10-12 million we will get for the company’s outsourcing units in their current form. There is no point in keeping full ownership of the units when we are selling it in any case,” Ayub said. “We will utilize the proceeds to further strengthen our Moscow-based operations, as well as keep significant funds within the Washington, D.C. arm to continue to expand the infrastructure that we utilize to deliver our Internet products in additional countries,” Ayub added.
Source:http://www.pr.com/press-release/349385
