Although Walmart-Flipkart wholesale game-plan is to target about a $150 billion market out of a total pie of $700 billion in the country, the consolidation marks the end of the multi-brand dream of the American retail giant.
A hot sale of a Chinese product, whether assembled in India or anywhere else in the world, may make the country of origin rule fall by the wayside. Moreover, its execution is challenging for businesses as there are no clear guidelines or definitions from the authorities on what constitutes 'country of origin'.
Mumbai's property markets, where prices earlier crossed Rs 1 lakh per sq. ft in South Mumbai, are seeing a 20-25 per cent markdown from last year's levels.
Real estate development on Mumbai airport land and the work on Navi Mumbai airport have been inordinately delayed, which have prompted rating downgrades and raised questions on its financial capabilities. It is also trying to stave off Adani group's entry as a shareholder in the Mumbai airport project.
Brookfield Asset Management will pay around Rs 29,000 per square foot for the 170,000 square feet of space in Jet Airways' two-floor office in Bandra Kurla Complex.
Among the options being weighed are discounts on existing rentals, short-term deferrals, and 50 per cent waivers.
Groceries, apparel, computers, phones and sporting accessories are among the most popular. There is also a growing trend of men visiting the store, rather than women.
At the heart of the matter are revenue-share rental agreements that retailers are mooting over fixed-rent contracts that they say are unsustainable, given the revenue loss they've suffered during the lockdown.
'I'm not surprised with what's happening in India,' 'Tiger' Tyagarajan tells Nivedita Mookerji.
Urban planners and real estate experts say bad town planning in Mumbai and rising deaths during the ongoing pandemic are a "sad reality". Dev Chatterjee and Raghavendra Kamath report.
India's biggest firm, Reliance Industries, has decided to cut salaries by 10 per cent in its oil and refining divisions. Several smaller companies like Kajaria Ceramics have followed suit with cuts as high as 40 per cent for those earning more than Rs 50 lakh.
'It's the brazen corruption involving politicians that makes you sit up years after the event,' notes Nivedita Mookerji after reading B K Syngal's Telecom Man.
Developers are cautious about the timing of launches in the near term, given the relative uncertainty in demand pick-up and logistical challenges during the lockdown. However, affordable housing projects slated for the first quarter (Q1) of 2020-21 (FY21) may get launched this quarter itself.
Several on-site labourers in the city want to take special trains being run to transport workers back home. The rising number of COVID-19 cases in the city has caused anxiety among them.
Experts say that the lockdown and its aftermath will further quicken the consolidation in the real estate sector, which has been taking place since 2012, with more small players going out of the business and bigger, branded players dominating the market.
Nivedita Mookerji goes in search of the elusive war room to track and respond to the coronavirus threat.
'High-value homes are designed and built on slum lands and slums are given residue. They do not have access to free air and live in close proximity of others.'
A single format and simpler, uniform rules would have kept the service going. In other parts of the world including in the US, managing demand and capacities along with ensuring preventive measures were an issue, but there was hardly any administrative hurdle anywhere.
CREDAI-MCHI, a body of developers in Mumbai, has pegged the drop in sales booking at around 80 per cent in the February-March period this year. This is the second highest fall in residential sales in the past five years, after Q1, 2017, when the decline, due to the note ban, was 37 per cent.
In the last one week several companies have had to face the hurdle of making a distinction between what's essential and what's not. To help them the government has now clarified that grocery would include hygiene products such as hand wash, soaps, disinfectants, body wash, shampoo, surface cleaners, detergents, tissue paper, toothpaste, oral care, sanitary pads, diapers, chargers and battery cells, etc.