Acme expects to raise Rs 1,200-1,400 cr via IPO

NEW DELHI: Acme Telepower Ltd (ATPL), the provider of innovative energy efficiency solutions and products for telecom infrastructure such as telecom base station towers, is targeting last week of January or early February for its public issue to raise about Rs 1,200-1,400 crore.

Since the company is offering 17.283 million equity shares of Rs 2 each, it is likely that it would price the issue in the band of between Rs 695 and Rs 810 per share.

“Depending on market conditions, we are hoping to offer 10-11% of our equity in the proposed IPO in the last week of January or early February next year,” ATPL managing director Manoj Upadhyay said at the company’s innovation centre at Manesar. “We are targeting to raise about $300-350 million through the IPO,” he added.

Prior to the proposed IPO, the company has placed through the private equity placement route a total of 2.856 million shares of Rs 2 each, representing 1.66% of the expanded capital base of the company, at a price of Rs 688 per share, aggregating to Rs 196.5 crore.

Out of these, 2.283 million shares have been placed with DB International Asia Ltd and the rest with two other equity capital funds, Earthstone Holding Pvt Ltd and Kotak Mahindra Capital Co Ltd. Upadhyay said the company plans to offload a total of 3-3.5% of its expanded equity to private equity funds before the IPO. It will also issue 2% of the share capital as ESOPs to its employees.

“We are a business-to-business company, leading innovation in energy efficiency solutions and products for telecom operators, and are thus well-known globally in the telecom sector. Our IPO is basically aimed at making us better known among the general public,” Upadhyay said.

Acme shot into prominence last month when it joined a host of other relatively-unknown companies to seek universal access service provider (UASP) licences for 12 telecom circles in the northern and western regions. But company officials acknowledged that the hopes of getting those licences have since receded because of the policy stance now being adopted by the government.

Upadhyay said the company has an interest in telecom tower business but is not actively looking at entering telecom infrastructructure business as a player. The telecom tower business is witnessing an explosive growth as operators roll out networks and raise their subscribers base, he said. “But our focus is on providing energy solutions to the telecom operators and not on creating telecom infrastructure as such,” he added.

ATPL, which started in 2003 with five people including Upadhyay, who has 14 years of experience in the power and telecom industry, as a consulting firm for providing energy solutions at telecom sites, has grown from a turnover of Rs 30 lakh that year to Rs 647 crore in fiscal 2007.

It now employees 2,000 people in its four R&D centres, including one each in Europe, Canada and the US, and two manufacturing facilities in Rudrapur in Uttarakhand and Parwanoo in Himachal Pradesh.

“This year up to November, we already have registered a turnover of Rs 900 crore and in the remaining four months, we expect to do even better,” Upadhyay said. While he refrained from making any forward-looking statement, company officials estimated that the turnover for the current year as a whole may even touch Rs 1,500 crore.

Upadhyay said the company is looking for opportunities in China, Indo-China region countries like Vietnam and Latin America to push forward its drive towards acquiring a global presence in its core business as a provider of innovative passive telecom infrastructure solutions.