NIIT acquires US-based corporate training firm

NIIT Chairman Rajendra Pawar (center)

NIIT Limited, which made a name for itself training millions of Indians with IT skills, said it acquired a US-based corporate training company.

NIIT will incur a cost of $8.1 mln (Rs 51.50 cr) over the next five years for the acquisition, including assumed debt and goodwill costs.

Eagle International Institute provides training programs for companies adopting sophisticated cloud-based applications in the Pharmaceutical and Life Sciences industry.

It had $10.7 mln (about Rs 70 cr) revenue for 2017, $10.0 mln in 2016 and $10.1 mln in 2015.

“The Life Sciences domain and Software Application Adoption expertise have been of keen interest to NIIT,” said Sapnesh Lalla, CEO, NIIT.

“The coming together of Eagle’s expertise and penetration in the Life Sciences space creates great opportunity for NIIT in both the Life Sciences and the Software Application domains.”

With this, NIIT expand its capabilities in global application rollouts of enterprise applications requiring high adoption and deepen its domain expertise in the pharmaceutical and life sciences domain. In turn, said NIIT, Eagle’s clients will gain access to more evolved service models, expanded capabilities including a richer variety in training Content.

“We’re being purchased as a practice with expertise intact,” said Bob Cannan, majority shareholder and CEO of Eagle since 1994. “It allows us to expand.”

“It’s the ideal fit for Eagle. We see this as a major opportunity to support the explosive growth of cloud Software – introduced with expertise, maintained with thoughtful attention.

“No single Company will be more capable of this than this new combination. We can service this market extraordinarily well.”

NIIT has, in recent years, diversified into allied regions such as travel and corporate training as its core IT training business has lost much of its initial momentum.

The IT sector is rapidly losing its appetite for armies of fresh engineering graduates to do mundane outsourcing work, which are now getting automated at a tremendous pace.