OnMobile Global Ltd, India’s top mobile value-added service (VAS) company, has agreed to sell its French subsidiary Voxmobili SA to New Jersey-headquartered Synchronoss Technologies Inc, a provider of synchronisation technology products, for $26 million, as per a stock market disclosure.
Early last month, OnMobile said that it has executed a non-binding Memorandum of Understanding with an unnamed buyer to sell Voxmobili.
Voxmobili, which specialises in mobile telecommunication products, was acquired by OnMobile in late 2007, just a few months before the Bangalore-based company floated its IPO. The deal was valued at $30.7 million in cash (including earnouts) besides stock worth Rs 18.6 crore or $4.6 million (at IPO issue price).
OnMobile acquired Voxmobili to expand operations to the Pacific, Australia and the US where it provided services to Orange, Cingular, Vodafone and France Telecom.
Although OnMobile has sold a few assets in the past, this marks the first significant divestment after a series of acquisitions in the past.
Its previous asset divestment was when it sold its entire stake in Kabuza Marketing to its joint venture partner Madison World, a little over a year ago.
Previously, it had also sold its stake in Ver Se, a Bangalore-based mobile VAS firm incubated by OnMobile. Ver Se had launched mobile classifieds solutions for telcos, such as Jobs On Mobile, which was offered by Airtel. It then launched products in m-commerce, web, telecom, data commerce and e-commerce.
Other acquisitions by OnMobile include ITFinity, Telisma, Dilithium Networks and Livewire Mobile.
Founded in 2000 by Mouli Raman and Arvind Rao, OnMobile offers services like content management, aggregation and distribution, voice short codes, missed call alerts, multimedia push services, mobile search, ringtones, ringback tones, phone backup, cloud address book, voice portals, music products, mobile radio, entertainment products like football, cricket, quizzes and gaming solutions, movies and a safety app called Help Me on Mobile.
In the recent past, the firm was hit by corporate governance issues related to its co-founder and former chief Arvind Rao.
(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)
