Homegrown shared office space provider Smartworks plans to raise USD 35-40 million in a mix of debt and equity to fund its plans to nearly double the portfolio to 5 million sqft by March, a top company official has said. The three-year-old Noida-based company is also eyeing a twofold increase in revenue for the fiscal to Rs 320 crore, managing director Neetish Sarda told PTI. "With 2.8 million sqft, we are the second largest after the multinational Wework which has around 3 million of space under it portfolio. We now plan to increase the portfolio to 5 million sqft by the end of this fiscal year for which we will be investing close to USD 35-40 million which will be mopped as equity and debt. "Access to funds from banks and institutions like NBFCs is easy. A lot of private equity investors are also approaching us and we are evaluating them, but we cannot disclose more that at this moment," he said. Last year the company closed with revenue of about Rs 110 crore with a profit margin of around 10 percent. "Our pan-India rentals on average are about Rs 10,000 a seat. We are confident of closing this fiscal with Rs 320 crore topline and profit margin of 20-30 percent," Sarda said. The company, which is currently present in nine cities including Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, and Pune among others, is also planning to expand into small towns. "Our immediate focus is consolidating in these nine cities. Then we will also enter one or two small towns but that is not going to be of significant scale... we will enter with 20,000-40,000 sqft size," he said. He said the company will continue to focus on enterprises or MNCs as they offer better margins. It competes with Wework, Regus, Cowrks, Awfis, Oyo Workspace, Goodworks, Gowork, Skootr, Indiuube, Avanta, 91 Springboard, Creator's Gurukul, Gohive, Oneculture, Plus Offices and Spring House Coworking among others. Over the weekend, yet another foreign company entered the already cluttered co-working space with the entry of Thailand's realty major MQDC, which opened its first center-- Whizdom Club--in Greater Kailash-II in south Delhi in a 22,000 sq ft area leased out from DLF and offers 400 seats. (This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Download The Devdiscourse News App for Latest News.
Noida-based Smartworks plans to raise $35m to $40m to fund the expansion of its footprint to five million sq ft by Last year. A number of private equity investors have approached the company, according to managing director Neetish Sarda, who said the fundraising would be a combination of equity and debt. With a portfolio totalling 2.8 million sq ft, the company claims to be the second largest multinational co-workspace operator in India after WeWork, which has around three million sq ft of space.