Ramco Systems raises Rs 325 crore through QIP

CHENNAI: Ramco Systems, a product software company part of the Ramco Group, has completed a Rs 325-crore fundraising through Qualified Institutional Placement in which top investment banks and fund houses such as Goldman Sachs, HDFC Mutual Fund, Axis MF have participated.

Consequent to this investment, public shareholding in Ramco has increased to 42.9% from 30.9%.

Ramco’s key product is its Enterprise Resource Planning software delivered on the cloud. The company has been investing in platform development and upgradations. It has also developed a software for e-commerce firms to help them manage their logistics resources. It has bagged a Singapore-based client for the product and is looking to enter the Indian market with that product.

Another of its key focus areas is aerospace, where it has a bevy of clients such as Emirates, Malaysian Airlines, Petroleum Helicopters, Columbia Helicopters, and Able Engineering.

Ramco Systems, which had been making losses for quarters in a row, had begun posting profits from the second half of last fiscal. It completed 2014-15 with a profit of Rs 12.7 crore as against a loss of around Rs 23 crore during fiscal 2013-14. During the March quarter 2014-15, the company had touched a quarterly revenue of Rs 100 crore for the first time in its history.

Commenting on the fund raising, PR Venketrama Raja, vice-chairman and managing director, Ramco Systems, said, “Globally, Cloud companies are getting a good valuation. This is the value that investors attach to IP-led businesses. India is slowly moving towards differentiating product software from services-led software businesses,”

The company had set up a fund raising committee that had approved in April the sale of over 51 lakh equity shares at a price of Rs 635 per equity share. The company’s stock today ended trade with a 2.24% drop down to Rs 588.5 on BSE.