Blackstone offloads 15% stake in Mphasis for $800 million

Global investment giant Blackstone on Monday sold 28.5 million shares of Mphasis Ltd in a block deal for ₹6,735.6 crore (about $800 million), in the second biggest such transaction this year.

Blackstone entity BCP Topco IX Pte Ltd sold the shares at ₹2,363.37 apiece, exchange data showed.

British American Tobacco, the biggest shareholder in ITC Ltd, had in March sold a 3.5% stake in the Indian conglomerate for about ₹17,500 crore (about $2.1 billion) in the biggest such deal so far this year.

Societe Generale, Morgan Stanley Asia Singapore, Kotak Mahindra Mutual Fund (Kotak Emerging Equity Scheme), and Kotak Funds (India Midcap Fund)    bought the shares.

Blackstone owned about 55.45% stake in the IT firm as on 31 March.

Shares of Mphasis that declined 3% on Monday following the block deal, was little changed from the previous day’s close ₹2,396.80 by 12pm at on Tuesday.

Following the stake sale, Blackstone’s stake has declined to 40.37%.

Initially, Blackstone Capital Partners had bought a 60.48% stake in Mphasis from Hewlett Packard Enterprises (HPE) for ₹5,466 crore in 2016.

In a separate development, Mphasis said it has partnered with HPE to implement the GreenLake cloud and Alletra Storage solutions to enhance IT services for healthcare clients.

The partnership boosts Mphasis’s capacity to manage data efficiently, optimizing storage and performance which in turn helps in better planning and service delivery in healthcare IT, the company said.