The staffing company FirstMeridian Business Services Ltd. plans further acquisitions to expand into new segments such as engineering staff, financial and accounting outsourcing and legal staff and to increase its presence in existing segments, said the group’s CEO Sudhakar Balakrishnan.
This will allow the company to leverage its existing assets and offer more comprehensive and attractive services to customers, he added.
“Our acquisition strategy aims to deepen and broaden our expertise and offering across all of our businesses and expand the geographic coverage of our offering,” said Mr. Balakrishnan.
“This industry has grown through mergers and acquisitions. On average, 130 to 135 acquisitions take place worldwide each year and India is no different,” he added.
The company has focused on acquisitions as part of its growth strategy since its inception.
“After our founding in 2018, we took over seven companies and integrated them well into our system. The most important thing, in my opinion, is people’s integration,” said Mr. Balakrishnan.
In 2018 it had acquired Innovsource Services and Innovsource Facilities, V5 Global Sevices and Affluent Global Services. Also, it had acquired the business verticals of Cornucopia V5 and CBSI India in 2020. In 2022, it acquired RLabs Enterprise Services with diverse capabilities including systems, applications and product technologies, artificial intelligence and robotics, mobility, cloud computing and enterprise storage.
As of December 2021, FirstMeridian served more than 1,200 clients across a variety of industries. Operating income was reported for the nine months ended December 2021 at £2,069 billion.
Highlighting the company’s growth over the past four years, Mr Balakrishnan said, “We have expanded our reach to 50 locations in 75 cities across India and almost doubled our workforce to 1.18 lakh employees, which as of March 2022 will increase to over 3,500 locations are used.”
FirstMeridian, which is backed by Janchor, Goldman Sachs and Samara Capital, filed preliminary papers with SEBI in May this year to raise ₹800 crore through an initial public offering (IPO).
According to the draft prospectus, the IPO will involve a new issue of shares with a total value of up to £50m and an offer to sell (OFS) worth up to £750m by organizers and existing shareholders.
