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Calcutta, July 20: LCC Infotech Ltd has reduced its turnover target for the current financial year from Rs 125 crore to Rs 100 crore without affecting its profit margins.
The company has the third largest network of infotech training institutes in the country after NIIT and Aptech.
Chairman and managing director Suresh Chandra Lakhotia said the company would introduce scholarships for students soon.
``We will be offering these scholarships from the second quarter of the current fiscal because of which our turnover may not reach the expected target of Rs 125 crore but our profitability will not be affected. It will be somewhere between Rs 8 and 9 crore,'' he said.
In a recent interview to The Financial Express Lakhotia spelt out the strategy of his company in this business. ``We adopted a strategy of admitting meritorious students by offering them scholarships. A meritorious student always does well and is easy to place. We managed to take our placement records up to 70 per cent by followingthis strategy. It succeeded and spread our reputation,'' he said.
He added that the training business would account for 85 per cent of the revenue and the rest will be from the software development segment. During the first quarter of the current, fiscal LCC Infotech registered a turnover of Rs 8.44 crore against Rs 34 lakh of the corresponding period of the previous year. Profit after tax was Rs 2.23 crore.
On April 1 this year, LCC Infotech, which was previously known as Arihant Housing Finance, took over the brand equity of Lakhotia Computer Centre from Suresh Chandra Lakhotia.
``After the takeover of Lakhotia Computer Centre, the company has been able to diversify into multimedia, communications and software development. In the first quarter, LCC Infotech earned Rs 41 lakh from software development,'' Lakhotia said.
The company plans to introduce computer-based training and technology-based training in addition to many new high-end courses as an extension of its present range of courses. It willalso include training courses on E-commerce, high-end multimedia and applications like enterprise resources planning.
Lakhotia said the company would provide turnkey solutions in the E-commerce segment. ``We are considering a tieup and have started discussions with certain companies but nothing has been finalised as yet,'' he said.
The company is also considering inducting new faces in the existing seven-member board. Apart from Lakhotia, his wife Kirti and son Siddharth, the other members are Santosh Kumar Jain, Narayan Jain, SM Devadasan and Sukumar Bhattacharya.
``After the end of the second quarter, we may induct some new faces in the board. However, we are yet to take a final decision on the new members. All of them will be experts in their fields,'' Lakhotia said.
LCC Infotech has around 1,60,000 students enrolled in its 600-centre network spread all over India. It has recently opened a centre in Jeddah. The company has a market share of 23 per cent in career courses and targets to increase itto 30 per cent in the next two years.
LCC Infotech has training tieups with two American companies -- Adobe Systems Inc and NewTek Technologies -- apart from the English company DPS and SCALA of Norway.
Copyright © 1999 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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This story was printed from Net Express located at http://www.expressindia.com. Net Express provides a portal to India, with news from The Indian Express and The Financial Express along with sites on travel and tourism, the entertainment industry, the power sector, the environment and much more.
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