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Caltiger.com plans IPO, Nasdaq listing

Our Bureau

CALCUTTA, June 20

CALTIGER.COM Ltd has announced plans for an initial public offering (IPO) aimed at raising $100 millions from overseas and securing listing on Nasdaq in October. The IPO funds would be deployed in a project to link the country through a fibre optic cable network.

At a news conference held here on Tuesday to announce that the company's subscriber base had now topped 2,00,000, Mr. Joe Silva, Chairman of Caltiger.com, said talks were on with merchant bankers for launching the proposed IPO between October 15 and 30. Mr. Silva informed that the London Stock Exchange, too, had evinced interest in having Caltiger listed on it.

Currently, the promoters hold 58 per cent of the equity in Caltiger.com with Translantic of Spain, SMIFS Ltd and employees of the company accounting for nearly the rest. IDBI, too, had taken up a token equity of one per cent in the company. The financial institution had been offered the option of nominating one representative on the board of directors of Caltiger.com, India's first free ISP.

Caltiger's paid-up capital base would be increased from Rs. 35 crores now to Rs. 50 crores before the IPO by way of a rights issue to existing shareholders. Post-IPO, however, the promoters' equity-holding would come down to around 35 per cent.

Mr. Silva said the company had recorded a profit of Rs. 80 lakhs on a revenue of Rs. 2.78 crores on operations in May 2000. With a multi-pronged revenue model in place, Caltiger was confident of ending the fiscal 2000-2001 with a net profit of Rs. 20 cro res. Besides button and banner advertisements, Caltiger was negotiating with several ISPs in 27 countries for offering its `narrow-casted advertisement technology.' These ISPs were based in Sri Lanka, Cyprus, Jordan, Pakistan, the Philippines and Pakista n, among others.

As e-commerce and applications service providers, Caltiger had signed deals worth Rs. 30 crores for providing bandwidth and marketing support. In Sri Lanka, a $3,00,000 deal had been signed with Hamas for licensing of e-service technology. The idea in th e long-term was to have more international gateways and offer wireless ISP. To facilitate this, it had been proposed to set up `teleports.' When permitted by law, the ISP would also offer long-distance telephony on the Internet backbone.

Currently, Caltiger's Internet services are spread across six cities in the country. Soft launches are scheduled for seven more cities -- Chennai, Mangalore, Kochi, Coimbatore, Baroda, Surat and Mysore -- on Wednesday. By December, Caltiger's Inter net services would able available in 100 cities across the country, Mr. Silva said. A total investment of Rs. 120 crores was being planned on fixed assets even as the fibre optic cable network would entail a cumulative investment of around Rs. 500 crores.

According to Mr. Silva, the company had decided to meet its requirement of funds for capital expenditure through dilution of equity while the operational expenditure would be raised from its revenue models.