Hewlett Packard Enterprise is looking to shed some weight in the new year.
The business technology giant is trying to sell off its 60.5% stake in the India-based IT services company Mphasis for roughly $1 billion, The Times of Indiareported on Monday. Hewlett Packard Enterprise enlisted Citigroup (C) to oversee the auction process, the report said, citing unnamed sources.
Hewlett Packard (HPE) inherited Mphasis when it bought the IT consulting company Electronic Data Systems (EDS) in 2008 for $13.9 billion. The Indian company has since operated as an independent subsidiary of Hewlett Packard.
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The Times of India report didn’t cite any potential buyers for Mphasis, but it did say that Japan-based IT company NEC, Indian IT companies Tech Mahindra, and L&T Infotech have previously sought to buy the business in the past. Big private equity firms The Carlyle Group and Advent International have also said to have been interested in buying Mphasis in the past, the report said.
Selling off Mphasis would come as Hewlett Packard tries to revamp its IT consulting and services group. In September, Hewlett Packard said it was planning to lay off around 28,000 to 33,000 workers, the bulk of which come from the company’s enterprise services group.
Hewlett Packard’s enterprise service group, largely a product of the EDS acquisition, specializes in selling consulting services to companies that didn’t want to maintain their own technology departments and old-school mainframe computing systems.
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However, that enterprise services group required a lot of staff. As more companies turn to cloud computing for their IT needs by renting computing resources from giants like Amazon (AMZN) and Microsoft (MSFT), they are buying less of the traditional IT consulting services that EDS and Mphasis has specialized in.
Coins2Day has reached out to HPE for comment and will update this story if it responds.
Update 1/12: An Mphasis spokesperson for said it “does not respond to rumours and speculations.”