Carlyle Group in team buying Home Depot unit on Home Services

Jan

Carlyle Group in team buying Home Depot unit

posted by admin in Home Depot

The Home Depot Inc. has sold its HD Supply segment for $10.3 billion to a group of private equity firms, including the Carlyle Group.

Atlanta-based Home Depot (NYSE: HD) said it will sell the unit to D.C.-based Carlyle Group, Clayton, Dubilier %26amp; Rice and Bain Capital. The deal is expected to close in the third fiscal quarter.

The net proceeds and other funds will be used to buy back company stock.

HD Supply is the second-largest distributor of construction, industrial and maintenance supplies in North America. Its 2006 revenue was more than $12 billion. The unit has nearly 1,000 locations in North America and employs 26,000 associates.

Separately, The Carlyle Group said Tuesday that it has invested $10.3 million in Elitecore Technologies Ltd., an information technology company based in India that focuses on Internet security and the convergent billing market.

Elitecore, based in Ahmedabad, will use Carlyles funds for product development, research and development, working capital and infrastructure buildup. The investment will come from Carlyle Asia Growth Capital Partners, a $680 million fund that invests in high-growth companies in China, India, Japan and Korea.

Elitecore sells a range of products under the brand name Cyberoam, including intrusion detection and prevention, content filtering, bandwidth management and gateway antivirus.

The company also offers a convergent billing product, Crestel, which provides billing, customer care, mediation and provisioning solutions to enable next-generation data, voice and video services over wire-line and wireless networks.

Elitecore is a perfect example of a company that has successfully leveraged the low cost, highly skilled Indian talent to develop a superior quality product that allows them to compete with players from the developed world, said Shankar Narayanan, managing director and head of Carlyles growth capital team in India, in a statement.