The Chandaria family, an NRI business group of about $ 6 billion, is on its way to divest its majority stake in UST Global, a Kerala-based mid-tier IT services company. Chandaria holds about 30% stake in the leading BPO entity,Cambridge Solutions and it is about to sell out to UK major Xchanging. Thus it can be seen that the list of mid-tier IT services companies is extending.

Citigroup is a shareholder in Chandarias, which hold around 11% stake in UST Global. It is believed that Citigroup along with the investment arm, Comcraft group of the Chandarias are likely to take away wholly or partially from the UST. UST has a revenue of around $ 100 million with interests in both IT and BPO operations. According to sources, there have been some exploratory talks between Mastek, the Mumbai based IT services company and UST Global, though there have not been any deserving match to take up the stake of the majority shareholder.

Along with a good number of staff in Kochi, Chennai, and Bangalore, the UST Global has got around 3,200 workers in Thiruvananthapuram. There have been a scope of the merge of Cambridge Solutions with UST Global. The pressure on the IT industries in India due to the slowing down of orders can be felt from the difficulties of the small and mid-tier companies, since they suffer the lack of scale and differentiation at the market place.  X