TV moghuls are ramping up the home shopping segment as it sees 35 per cent annual growth. While shopping on TV has been available for years now, a majority of Indian shoppers still prefer to touch and feel before buying a product.
BATA is expanding fast through large-format stores and increasing its focus on institutional business.
The suggestion for this special pay was part of a memorandum that the All India IIT Faculty Federation submitted to the Ministry of Human Resources and Development (MHRD) on August 23, stating that the pay structure proposed is unacceptable and a threat to the IIT system.
In 2008, any question about job offers drew grim looks from B-school students and professors. This year, the smiles are back. The premier Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) and other prominent B-schools like XLRI Jamshedpur are confident that 2009 will be better than 2008.
Globally, Perfetti Van Melle ranks third in the confectionery sweepstakes after Mars and Cadbury. But in India, it leads the pack with a 25 per cent share of the Rs 3,000-crore (Rs 30 billion) per annum market
For 33-year-old Amit Lakhmani, the chief executive officer of Kolkata-based wireless and internet value-added service provider Max Mobility, embarking on a business outside of the then booming manufacturing and services sector was a natural choice.
Fraught four-month-long negotiation between Tata Motors-owned Jaguar Land Rover and the United Kingdom government over a loan guarantee ended in an anti-climax on Tuesday, with the Mumbai-headquartered automobile maker announcing that it has secured loans from commercial banks and would not need any support from the UK government.
With the rural segment accounting for 60 per cent of sales for fast moving consumer goods companies and 40-50 per cent for consumer durables manufacturers, the government's admission of sowing having fallen almost 20 per cent due to the weak monsoon, and declaring 161 districts as drought-prone, has put these sectors under a cloud.
These companies are also reinforcing their product line, changing product offerings, focusing on 'recession-proof' sectors like pharma and healthcare, education, telecom and utilities to tide over the dip in volumes.
This upturn comes soon after an earlier stalling of demand. In February, DLF, the country's largest property developer, said it had stalled construction on 16 million sq ft of commercial space (retail and office) due to lack of demand. So, too, with other developers like Unitech, Parsvnath and Raheja, who either stalled or slowed the construction of their commercial properties because of a demand-supply mismatch.
Tuesday's move, announced at a press conference in the capital, comes a little over a month after an accident killed six workers at a metro construction site on July 12. The accident, the latest in a series over the past year, raised public outrage and prompted Delhi Metro Rail Corporation's widely respected chief E Sreedharan to submit his resignation, which the state government declined to accept.
After the initial struggle, ITC Foods is finally making its presence felt through its parent's distribution muscle.
GE India, the $2.8 billion industrial giant, plans to invest $6 billion till 2015 in medical systems, services and IT tailor-made for rural India. Also, GE, the parent company, is looking at making India the sourcing hub for aerospace parts and healthcare products and is in the process of developing a supply chain for this.
Given the cut-throat competition in the FM radio space, radio companies are always on the look out for newer, untapped areas. And perhaps that is the reason why major radio stations such as Big FM, RadioCity and Fever FM have descended on the World Wide Web as well as the mobile platform.
The scheme allows a permanent employee to take leave for up to two years without pay or allowances and return to join at the same level where he or she left. The decision comes a few days after the unions suggested several schemes, including leave without pay to cut costs while maintaining the interests of the employees. In Mumbai, the airline announced it has set up a committee comprising representatives of the management and the unions to turn around the airline.
Nandan Nilekani will have the responsibility to lay down plans and policies to implement the Unique Identity card scheme and shall own and operate the UID database. The authority was notified on January 28 this year as an attached office under the aegis of the Planning Commission with an initial core team of 115 officials and staff. The scheme will be implemented in three years.
Real estate developer K Raheja Universal Private Ltd wants to scrap one of their notified special economic zones and also surrender a part of another zone, citing lack of demand from the information technology sector.
It's actually a problem of plenty for investors now. Buoyed by the success of the three companies that sold their QIP issues within a day of opening, as many as 32 companies have joined the queue, hoping to raise a combined Rs 40,000 crore (Rs 400 billion).
Speculators often leveraged volume discounts on property purchases to re-sell them at prices lower than those available to individual buyers. This created problems for realtors when demand slowed, since it put pressure on them to take a hit on margins and lower prices still further. The lock-ins are expected to be introduced mostly for mid-income projects that offer prices 20 to 30 per cent below the market and, therefore, attract more undercutting from bulk discount buyers.
Developers in the past year have restructured debt, sold non-core assets and tweaked the product mix, helping push up sales. This has encouraged investors to buy stocks of real estate companies and motivate analysts to revise price targets and upgrade the outlook on the sector. Reflecting the positive sentiment, the Bombay Stock Exchange Realty Index rose 58 per cent in the past month, outpacing the benchmark Sensitive index's gain of 27 per cent.