eGeneration, the first software technology company to gopublic, is raising quite the interest among general investors, who placed orders for shares 40.76 times their allotted amount.
Investors booked shares worth more than Tk 611.43 crore against the Tk 15 crore allocated for them.
The lucky few will get to know at 11.30 am today whether they have managed to get shares when the company’s initial public offering lottery draw will be held.
The IPO draw results will be published on the websites of the Dhaka Stock Exchange, Chittagong Stock Exchange and the company’s own.
“We are grateful, humbled, and thrilled,” Shameem Ahsan, managing director of eGeneration, told Dhaka Tribune yesterday.
“Being the first software technology company to get approval for IPO, this overwhelming response from the market and investors’ interest in our company made it immensely encouraging for us. We are firmly committed to upholding this confidence of general investors through our impact-driven business model and continuous growth.”
The 17-year-old company, which is the only Bangladeshi licencing solutions partner (LSP) of Microsoft and premier partner of SAP (ERP solutions provider), plans to use about 65.6 per cent of the IPO proceeds for business expansion.
And the crown jewel of eGeneration’s business expansion plans is a digital healthcare platform.
The healthcare sector is significantly behind other sectors in terms of using data and emerging technologies, said Ahsan, also a former president of the Bangladesh Association of Software and Information Services.
“If the hospitals transformed themselves digitally in the pre-pandemic period, we probably would not have lost so many experienced doctors, healthcare staff and patients during this pandemic.”
The digital healthcare platform in the works would digitalise the medical records, linked to the national identity card database and accessible between hospitals.
The platform is already being piloted with members of the Border Guard of Bangladesh.
According to the World Health Organisation, 1 in 10 patients experience medical errors while receiving hospital care, and one of the main reasons behind this is paper-based manual medical record-keeping, Ahsan said.
“That is why we are putting a lot of emphasis on the adoption of electronic medical records.”
It will also enable health system interoperability so that a patient’s health records from one hospital are made readily available to other hospitals and physicians.
“We are working relentlessly to help bring a cultural transformation initiated by advanced technologies that will lead to an equal-level partnership between patients and their caregivers,” said Ahsan, also the chairman of the Venture Capital and Private Equity Association of Bangladesh.
Some of its upcoming products are blockchain, cloud computing, data centre, agriculture prediction system, money laundering detector, agriculture automation system, etc, according to a report of Brac-EPL.
At present, eGeneration offers low-cost IT services to banks and financial institutions, garment and textile factories, consumer goods industries, e-commerce, business-to-business platform and different departments of the government.
Some of its notable clients include the ICT division, Sonali Bank, Robi, bKash, S Alam Group, Brac University, the report said.
About 52 per cent of eGeneration’s revenue of Tk 39.6 crore in its 2019-20 financial year came from three clients: Bangladesh Computer Council (21.3 per cent), Robi (19.4 per cent) and Sonali Bank (11.7 per cent), according to Brac-EPL’s research.
“Although the industry can be run remotely, the regular activities of the industry were hampered due to cancellation or postponement of products from the client-side resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic,” the report said.
Demand for IT products from overseas clients also plunged at the same time, the report said.
According to industry experts, annual revenue declined by 20-25 per cent in the 2019-20 financial year.
“Despite facing all these obstacles, eGeneration registered 8.9 per cent top-line growth,” the Brac-EPL report added.
The top line refers to a company’s revenues or gross sales.
Ahsan is expecting eGeneration’s revenue to hit Tk 57 crore by next year.
