i-flex Solutions surged further on Saturday to touch its new 52-week high of Rs 965.

By 12:05 IST, the scrip of the Mumbai-based software major was up by 3.69% at Rs 950 on the BSE. It registered a volume of over 163,000 shares. In the last eight months, between today's 52-week high of Rs 965 and its 52-week low of Rs 433.05 on 29 July 2002, the stock rose by 122.8%.

As per market buzz, IL&FS was an active buyer on the counter on Friday.

Analysts said the surge in the i-flex stock was on bargain hunting following the sustained order flow to the company and on hopes that the ongoing US-Iraq war may end soon.

On 20 March 2003, i-flex announced that IC Bank Rt. Budapest, Hungary has selected its flagship product ‘Flexcube' to streamline operations in the areas of bills and collections, loans and deposits, foreign exchange and funds transfer among others. With the implementation of Flexcube, IC Bank will be able to provide faster services to clients from any branch through a single banking platform.

Of late, i-flex has been in the limelight following the huge success of its key banking product Flexcube, which has been instrumental in pushing up the company's fortunes. The product has already been rolled out in more than 30 countries.

Earlier, the company said that International Monetary Fund has selected 'Reveleus', its business intelligence and data warehouse technology offering, for the design and implementation of a data warehouse to ease information access and management challenges for its Treasury department. As part of the solution, the IMF will implement Reveleus pre-built business analytics for a more thorough analysis of information in its liquidity planning, financial forecasting and reporting functions. Reveleus' unique metadata-driven technology platform will ensure that IMF has a holistic view of the information within its systems.

There were also reports that i-flex has bagged a $200-million order from Citigroup. It may be noted that Citigroup, the global financial services company, has a 42% stake in the company. According to reports, this is the largest software project awarded to an Indian software services company till date. The contract will run till 2005-end. Citigroup plans to implement i-flex's banking software product Flexcube in more than 93 countries.

Flexcube has been ranked among the two top selling wholesale banking back-office systems in 1999 and 2000, and among the three top selling retail banking systems in the world in 2000 by IBS. In 2001, it was ranked among the two top selling solutions in both the retail banking and the wholesale banking sales league table.

i-flex Solutions, a leading provider of technology solutions to the financial services sector, derives over 60% of its revenues from high margin products. Its range of solutions includes packaged applications for the financial services industry, custom application software development, deployment, maintenance and support services for financial institutions, and business and IT consulting services in the financial services domain.

For the third quarter ended 31 December 2002, i-flex announced (on consolidated basis) a rise in net profit by 117% to Rs 59 crore, compared to Rs 27.18 crore in the corresponding period of the previous year. Revenues increased by 50% to Rs 174 crore (Rs 1.74 billion) from Rs 115.66 crore (Rs 1.15 billion) in DQ 2001.

As on 31 December 2002, the promoters' holding in i-flex was 43.2%, while the public, local institutions and foreign institutions held 40.6%, 4.3% and 10.96%, respectively.