Infrastructure major Larsen and Toubro said it acquired 73,953 shares of IT firm Mindtree from the open market. The latest purchase comes three days after it acquired 13,443 shares in the IT company.
After the latest transaction, L&T’s shareholding in Mindtree stands at 26.53%. The latest stock purchase was made at Rs 979 price per share, said L&T.
L&T is in the middle of a hostile takeover of the mid-size IT services provider.
It started by purchasing a 20% stake from VG Siddhartha and Cafe Coffee Day through a block deal at a cost of Rs 3,210 crores, and has been following it with purchases from open market.
On May 16, it said it had brought 8.86 lakh shares of Mindtree from the open market.
L&T is planning to buy about 66 per cent stake in Mindtree for around Rs 10,800 crore, marking the country’s first-ever hostile takeover bid in the information technology industry.
Headquartered in Bengaluru and New Jersey, USA, Mindtree deals in e-commerce, mobile applications, cloud computing, digital transformation, data analytics, enterprise application integration and enterprise resource planning. Founded in 1999, the company employs more than 20,000 employees and has more than 339 clients in over 17 countries. Mindtree’s had generated an annual revenue of USD 1 Billion in FY 2018-19.
The infrastructure major had proposed to buy additional stake in Mindtree through an open offer that was slated to begin on May 14 and close on May 27.
However, reports suggest that the open offer is likely to be postponed by at least two weeks as L&T is yet to get approval from Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI).
Headquartered in Mumbai, L&T is one among the largest multinational firms and construction company in the country today with operations in more than 30 countries worldwide.