Late last month, ICT Group generated $428.2 million in revenue during 2008, down from $453.6 million a year earlier. The company also reported a net loss of $23.2 million, deeper than the $11.8 million loss it took in 2007.
Around that time, the company’s compensation committee denied top executives bonuses, citing the company’s failure to meet any of its quarterly or annual incentive plan goals. So why did ICT’s stock price jump from $3.60 per share to $5.91 per share yesterday?
Because Aegis Ltd., a back-offices unit of Essar Group, made a friendly eight-dollar-per-share bid for the company on Monday. The offer is based on a significant premium over the stock’s price during the last 30 days. ICT’s board has not commented on the proposal.
ICT provides a variety of outsourced customer care/retention, technical support and customer acquisition, and cross-selling/upselling offerings, as well as market research, database marketing, data entry/management, email response management, remittance processing, and other back-office business processing services. The company primarily serves financial services, insurance, telecommunications, healthcare, energy services, information technology, business and consumer products and services, and government markets.
The Cynic’s Take: Readers who listened to the financial reports this morning, after The Dow fell another 300 points, and heard that stock market losers outnumbered gainers by 4,000 to one or whatever it was, well…this was the one.
