Ybrant Digital Limited and LGS Global announced that the
two companies propose to merge to create a global digital marketing powerhouse.
The merger is subject to regulatory approvals from Indian
stock exchanges and the high court of Andhra Pradesh, India. The proposed
combined entity will be named as Ybrant Digital.
Ybrant has a track record of acquiring and integrating
businesses from across the world. In the last five years, Ybrant has made seven
acquisitions on a wholly-owned basis, latest being Lycos from Waltham,
Massachusetts.
Ybrant Digital has raised over $100 million in equity and
debt from some of the top PE funds. Ybrant’s shareholders include premium
institutional investors like Oak Investment Partners, GE Asia Pacific Capital,
among others.
The new Ybrant will offer comprehensive digital marketing
services for businesses, publishers and agencies, with a commitment to serving
customers with best of the breed platforms.
Ybrant Digital services global brands including SAP,
Porsche, Ford, UPS, Swissair, Chevrolet, 3M, Jeep, US Army, LaSalle and
Lufthansa. Besides owning proprietary media such as Lycos, Gamesville, getMedia
in Latin America and several travel websites in Australia, Ybrant Digital
partners with top global publishers such as Facebook, Google, MSN, Yahoo!, and
Viacom, and assists over 140 top Ad Agencies including OMD, Carat, MediaCom,
Group M, Quasar, Razorfish, Mindshare, Maxus, OmniCom and Oglivy, spread across
Europe, the Americas and Asia.
Suresh Reddy, chairman and CEO of Ybrant, will be the
chairman and CEO of the combined entity. Subba Rao Karusula, managing director
of LGS, will be the Business Head of the LGS Division of Ybrant.
This is a decisive move that accelerates our strategy
and positions us to win by offering even greater value to our customers and
partners,” said Suresh Reddy. In addition to the clear strategic benefits of
combining two highly complementary organizations, we can create substantial
shareholder value through significant cost structure improvements and access to
much larger resource pool.”
We are creating a new kind of industry leader – one
founded on customer success, world-class engineering, and best-of-breed
products and services. In sharp contrast to our competitors, we are committed
to leading the industry to open, market-unifying architectures and
interoperability, which reduce complexity and cost for our customers. With this
move, we intend to change the basis of competition in the industry,” Rao said.
The transaction is expected to be substantially accretive
to Ybrant’s pro forma earnings per share in the first full year of combined
operations based on achieving planned cost synergies. These anticipated
synergies result from efficiencies in administration, procurement, development
and marketing.
It would have operations in more than 20 countries with
over 1200 employees.
By Telecomlead.com Team
editor@telecomlead.com
