Aditya Birla Minacs, which provides customised business process outsourcing solutions, is working on several acquisitions, especially in the US and Canada, to expand its client base and acquire new capabilities.

“The inorganic transactions we are working on are not to boost our top line. They are targeted at helping us grow in insurance, banking and financial services, finance and accounting, collections and healthcare respectively,” said Deepak J Patel, its CEO.

The company is scouting for targets in all these sectors in the $2 million to $50 million range and is willing to spend several hundred million dollars for a strategic acquisition. “We are clearly not interested in a plain vanilla call centre,” Patel said. The company recently acquired Compass BPO to strengthen its finance and accounting capabilities.

Minacs hopes that an acquisition will help it add new customers in the sector. “Just hiring good people and having a business plan doesn’t help sign up customers here,” Patel said.

In sectors such as healthcare, Patel feels experienced employees help open doors but “unless you have staff potential clients can interview who are already working on processes for other healthcare customers, and closing business is difficult”.

After giving charge of the integrated IT and ITeS business to Patel, Kumar Mangalam Birla, chairman of the group that has interests ranging from copper to telecom, has also approved hiring of senior talent for Minacs from organisations as diverse as Progeon, IBM, HOV Services, Mahindra Satyam to Wachovia Bank.

To increase profits, Minacs has decided to sweat its assets in the US and Canada while scaling up operations in India and the Philippines. Out of its 18 facilities in North America, the company has closed operations in Saskatoon and Chatham and sold one in Pickering, all in Canada. It also reopened one of them as demand returned. Many of these long-term lease facilities were being used only up to half their capacity. “We have taken out about $30 million of the cost from our North American operations,” said Patel.

The company achieved this through restructuring, which included shutting down a software development facility that employed 250 people and moving it offshore. “Eighty per cent of our business in North America is from call-centre activities. We have offshored all the back-office work supporting these BPOs such as scheduling of agents, reporting variances, etc,” he said.