Company director K Srinivasan told The Financial Express that the base for this will be laid by expanding operations in chosen areas of high-end training and by opening new training centres in the country and abroad.

PCL recently concluded a preferential allotment with Foreign Institutional Investors (FIIs) and domestic financial institutions (FIs) by allotting 30 lakh equity shares of Rs 10 each at a price of Rs 160 per share to raise Rs 48 crore.

Srinivasan said the company has paid off high cost borrowings worth Rs 15 crore from banks and financial institutions by end of last month. The borrowings were made for working capital requirements and came at an interest rate of 20 per cent.

After paying off the high-cost debt, the company proposes to invest a little over Rs 30 crore in expanding its operations by opening new training centres inBangladesh, Sri Lanka, a major CAD-CAM centre in Pune, 15 new centres for E-business and seven centres for geographic integrated systems training.

"We will be focussing on new areas like data warehousing and data mining andE-commerce in the coming years," Srinivasan said.

The company already has six centres operating from Chennai, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Calcutta, Delhi and Coimbatore for doing E-Business work. According to Srinivasan, almost 80 per cent of business transactions abroad are done nowadays through the Internet and corporates who do not want to be left out of the markets have to get into this new way of doing business.

So PCL on its part will be pushing for becoming a major player in areas like E-commerce, e-mail and web-designing. For example a web-designer can get as much as $80 an hour from the US but it could be a little less from the West Asian countries at $65 an hour.