Yatra acquires Air Travel Bureau

Yatra, the NASDAQ listed online travel Company, has entered into an agreement to acquire Air Travel Bureau Ltd, which it says is India’s largest independent corporate travel services provider, with gross bookings of Rs 1500 crores, and a client base of over 400 large and medium businesses across India.

ATB is a 30 year old company and claims that it can help companies save up to 20% of their corporate travel costs. For ATB, they’ll also get access to Yatra’s aggregation of hotels, which they can offer to their clients. According to ATB’s website, they have their own online booking tool with web-fares; travel policy compliance tools, built-in trip authorization and travel notifications, and a real-time view of travel spend for travel managers, apart from integration with ERP solutions like SAP and Oracle.

The acquisition of ATB essentially helps Yatra strengthen its position in the more reliable corporate travel business vertical, even as it tries to find its own space in a market that the MakeMyTrip - Goibibo combine dominate. In July 2016, Yatra had signed a reverse-merger agreement with US-based special purpose acquisition company Terrapin 3 Acquisition Corp, which was listed on the NASDAQ, paving the way for a back-door listing of the second Indian online travel services provider in the US.

Yatra was founded in 2006 by former Ebookers Group (UK) executives Shringi, Manish Amin and Sabina Chopra. Amin is now chief information officer and Chopra is executive vice president of operations. The company is backed by a string of venture capital, private equity and strategic investors. In October last year, it sold a small stake to Reliance Industries Ltd as part of a deal linked to an existing partnership where Reliance pre-installed the Yatra mobile app in its Lyf-branded 4G handsets.

Paytm Acquires Near.in

Mobile wallet and e-commerce company Paytm has bought home service marketplace Near.in for an undisclosed amount. The move is part of its increasing focus on online to offline (O2O) and Hyperlocal commerce. The company expects more than half of its sales to come from the Hyperlocal channel by 2016.

Near.in (run by Thumbspot Inc.), which connects users with local businesses for home services through a marketplace app, was founded in December 2014. It last raised a seed funding of $300,000 by a group of Angel investors. Other than this there are investors from Healthkart, SAP Labs, and Aspiring Minds. Near has a significant network of local service providers in place and a stellar team leading it.

Paytm is India’s largest mobile commerce platform. With its mobile first strategy, Paytm does more than $100 Million transactions of various digital and physical goods every month. Paytm Wallet is India’s dominant mobile Paytm service platform. Based in Delhi-NCR, its investors include Ant Financials (AliPay), SAIF partners, Sapphire Venture and Silicon Valley Bank.

The company also plans to venture into travel with Hotel, air and rail ticket bookings in partnership with online travel companies such as Goibibo and Yatra and budget accommodation marketplaces OYO Rooms and ZO Rooms. The company already sells bus tickets. Apart from tying up with online travel partners, the company will also allow offline travel agents to list on its platform.

Wipro buys German Firm Cellent

Wipro Ltd has bought Cellent AG, a German Technology company that implements and maintains SAP (systems applications and products) software for clients in automobile and manufacturing segments, for $78 Million. The purchase is the latest move by India’s third largest software firm to scale up its business in the DACH or Germany, Austria and Switzerland of Western Europe.

This is Bengaluru based Wipro second purchase in the region this year. It bought Denmark based Designit for $95 Million in July to strengthen its presence in the digital space. Cellent is a well-established player with marquee customers, a well-known brand and has strong local talent. Cellent client include marquee car maker Daimler AG and lens maker Carl Zeiss AG and SAP is a business software used to run basic functions in finance, human resources and manufacturing.

Wipro bought Cellent from its parent firm, German bank Landesbank Baden-Wuerttemberg. Wipro will also see Cellent’s more than 800 consultants join the firm even as it expects to close the acquisition by the fourth quarter of 2015-16. Many buyouts by homegrown information technology firm this year are in the SAP space. Earlier this year, Infosys paid $200 Million to buy automation technology provider Panaya.

Mid-tier Bengaluru based software exported Mindtree bought UK based Bluefin Solutions, which helps migrate SAP installed software, like ERP to the cloud. Wipro 8000 strong manufacturing and hi-tech segment is the second largest industry vertical, behind banking and finance.