BPEA sells Coforge stake for ₹7,684 cr

BPEA EQT on Thursday sold its entire 26.63% stake in Coforge Ltd (formerly NIIT Technologies) for ₹7,684 crore to multiple investors through bulk deals, leaving the software services firm without a promoter and the first of its kind to be entirely owned by public investors.

- Anirudh Laskar & Sneha Shah

The block deals in the software services firm boosted its stock by around 10% to ₹5,391 on Thursday, with the transactions drawing marquee investors such as SBI Mutual Fund, Aditya Birla Mutual Fund, Capital Group and Kotak Mahindra Group.

Coforge is a professionally managed company, and hence, no identifiable promoter is a good thing, said an analyst. “That’s how a lot of matured companies in the US are. They are all 100% publicly owned. Besides, now the large mutual funds and other shareholders will sit on the board, which is a positive," the analyst said on condition of anonymity.

BPEA sold its 16.27 million shares at ₹4,722.15 each in a series of bulk deals. The shares were sold at a 4% discount to Coforge’s Wednesday closing price of ₹4,913.1.

SBI Mutual Fund, the country’s largest asset management company, bought 4.2% of Coforge for ₹1,213.84 crore in Thursday’s transaction.