Cyient to acquire Portugal-based Celfinet for ₹340 crore

Hyderabad-based technology solutions firm, Cyient, has signed agreements to acquire Celfinet, a Portugal-based wireless engineering service provider for approximately Rs. 340 crore (€41 million), the company announced today.

The acquisition will help the company strengthen its presence in Europe, where Celfinet has a strong footprint, and help scale Cyient’s business across North America and Australia, it said in a statement. The company provides solutions for communication service providers (CSPs) to build intelligent infrastructure, smart operations, and enterprise network transformation, according to Krishna Bodanapu, managing director and chief executive of Cyient.

“Celfinet’s deep expertise and long-standing customer relationships will further add to our capabilities as we strengthen our technology play in wireless networks for 5G rollouts. In addition, Portugal has a highly skilled engineering workforce, making it a strategic innovation hub for expanding our global delivery footprint,” he added.

The homegrown firm had also signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Hyderabad (IITH) and WiSig Networks, a startup incubated at the college, for bulk production of chips designed for Internet of Things (IoT) products. 

The company claimed that the chip would be the chip architected and designed chip in India, and will be called the Koala NB-IoT system-on-chip (SoC). NB-IoT stands for narrowband IoT, which is a wireless communication standard for IoT devices that require small amounts of data and low bandwidth, like smart meters.

“IITH and WiSig developed the Koala chip, and Cyient enabled the IC (integrated circuit) design for this project. Volume production of the NB-IoT SoC includes the development of a package, production test solution suited for volume production, organisation of silicon fabrication, volume testing of the IC, and the management of supplying the chip,” Cyient said in a statement at the time.