Rolta India buys US-based OnGIS Inc

Rolta India Ltd has acquired OneGIS Inc in USA through its subsidiary Rolta International Inc for an undisclosed sum.

The acquisition provides Rolta capability in mobile geospatial information solutions (GIS), which is targeted at field force automation usages. It already earns about 75% of its revenues from GIS and engineering design services (EDS).

The Mumbai-based company sees this as a strategic acquisition. “There is not much money involved in the deal. This is more a strategic acquisition which will help us access a large customer base,” a company source said, requesting he not be named as he is not authorised to speak.

OneGIS has more than 100 customers in the telecom, power and water utility space in the US, although the projects it undertakes are usually small in terms of revenue,  a source familiar with the deal said.

“OneGIS does some extremely strategic work though each project may be of the size of $100,000 or slightly more. The scope is huge for Rolta as it would target the telecommunication sector both abroad as well as in

India,” the source said According to this person, OneGIS Inc has revenues of “a couple of million dollars” with a workforce of about 15 key GIS consultants besides other people.

It offers consulting on GIS to infrastructure management markets including electric, gas and water utilities, telecommunications companies and governments.

On the earnings side, analysts feel a lower dollar exposure of about 3% works in Rolta’s favour.

In an April 9 report to clients, Vishal Agarwal and Surendra Goyal of broking firm Citigroup Global Markets wrote, “55% of Rolta’s FY09 revenues came from India, much higher than that of most IT services players which typically have domestic market exposure in single digits. Most US$ revenues have dollar costs for expenses like onsite salaries and sales commissions and secondly some expenditure for the domestic business also has dollar costs in terms of software licenses. Thus Rolta has a natural hedge.”