After selling Hexaware, Atul Nishar longs for ‘nothingness’

MUMBAI: Atul Nishar, with a Rs 1,000 crore cheque from selling his software services company Hexaware Technologies to PE fund Barings Asia last week, is now in search of nothingness. Unlike Indian businessmen who plan their next move before they exit from the business they owned, Nishar wants to feel the void for now.

“I have been constantly working for more than last 30 years and never took a break. This is a great opportunity for me to take a pause and feel nothingness,” says Nishar who will now be elevated as chairman. Soon he will register for a 10-day meditation or vipasana course and then attend a detoxification camp in Kerala, called Panchakarma.

Nishar's break is well deserved as he never had the temperament to work for someone else though his doctor father wanted him to be a professional than an entrepreneur.

“I always knew I wanted to do something of my own. I never had the temperament to work for someone else. I was fine to run a shop as well. I think my family, including my wife, who is a practicing doctor, too, understood that and allowed me to go my way,” Nishar said. But, he admits he envies a professional’s life, which is much more stress-free than the lifestyle of a promoter of a business.

Building and selling is not new to Nishar, a chartered accountant.

In mid-2005, he sold his computer training institute Aptech to billionaire stock investor Rakesh Jhunjunwala. Nishar was a pioneer in training students along with Rajendra Pawar of NIIT. “When he came with Aptech and the training, I really felt that he, along with Rajendra Pawar, was a pioneer when it came to the Indian industry,” says Ashok Soota, cofounder of mid-sized IT firm Mindtree and IT startup Happiest Minds.

Hexaware’s growth from mid-90s is linked to a favourable regulatory environment and a relaxed tax regime. “The real growth started with Y2K and the enterprise resource planning (ERP) boom in the late 1990s and our growth coincided with the computer revolution world over,” says Nishar. Hexaware revenues shot up five times in a decade to $250 million from $50 million.

But, investors had a tough time with returns and analyst say Hexaware lacked the aggression to strike deals with clients. Hexaware market value is just Rs 3,600 crore dwarfed by rivals like Cognizant which started a year earlier.

Cognizant went on to displace market leader Infosys as the second largest company by revenue and commands a market value of $22 billion on the Nasdaq.

“Initially, they were hit because they were not aggressive on deals and their small size made it hard to compete for big ticket contracts,” says a Mumbai-based analyst from a domestic brokerage. He added that a change in top guard shifted company’s gears.

“But, once they brought in seasoned professionals like Rusi Brij from Satyam that began to change. They didn’t grow as much then, but they caught up with growth in the last decade,” the analyst added. According to him, Cognizant has always been one of the more skilled and aggressive players in the market, which helped boost its growth.

Many bankers said Nishar could no longer hold on to his company as buyers insisted on management control and the growth for companies like Hexaware had plateaued. PE investor General Atlantic was scouting for a buyer for its stake for almost two years as the fund had reached its investment period. “The growth in top line IT companies had plateaued,” says a long-term investor in Hexaware. He agreed that company could have grown faster during the last half of the decade.