New Delhi, Nov 16: Helios & Matheson Information Technology is likely to be listed by the end of November or first week of December, said a senior company official. The shares are expected to be listed at a good premium to the offer price of Rs 50 considering the current software boom on the stock markets. Despite an unimpressive track record and the company's recent entry into the software sector, the Rs 10.81-crore IPO received an overwhelming response - the IPO was oversubscribed 10.6 times.Ridding piggy-back on the unsatiated investor appetite for software IPOs, the company received over 30,000 applications for its IPO. It mopped up Rs 57.58 crore as application money (investors had to cough up Rs 25 on application and the balance on allotment). The company had offered 21.63 lakh shares at a price-earning multiple of 8.29. The projected EPS of Rs 7.32 discounted the offer price of Rs 50 by a low PE multiple of 6.83. Even assuming a price earning multiple of 28 (which lower than the industry average) on listing, the stock should scale past the Rs 200-mark. This could give some good exit opportunities to investors.
The company has projected a total income of Rs 14.13 crore for the current fiscal. Of this, Rs 7 crore will come from career, corporate training and consulting from existing as well as additional units, Rs 2 crore from development of NetCentric computing, Rs 1 crore from product sales, Rs 2 crore from exports and a sizeable portion of Rs 2.13 crore from other income. Net profit is expected to be around Rs 3.66 crore. For the first three months of the current fiscal (unaudited results), the company has achieved a net profit of Rs 66.91 lakh on a total income of Rs 3.73 crore. This gives an annualised EPS of Rs 5.34 (on the post-issue equity of Rs 5 crore) for fiscal 2000.
The company, hitherto engaged in the finance sector, plans to further bring down the share of its financial services division to total turnover. The company does not have a good track-record. For the 18-months ended March 1997, net profit before extra-ordinary income stood at Rs 18 lakh which dipped to Rs 6.9 lakh in the ensuing fiscal. For 1998-99, profit after tax grew to Rs 1.25 crore.
The company is into networking solutions and low-end software services maintenance, migration, upgradation, etc. It also has a presence in the software education and IT consulting business. The company has chalked out a Rs 12-crore project for making a foray into netcentric computing, specialising in intranet and internet based business applications and e-commerce; establishing a digital studio for visual computing and multimedia based business applications; setting up tech-commercial offices at USA and Singapore; and expansion through setting up 10 additional centres.
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