A 5% increase is expected due to additional interest on approval costs.
India's largest cement firm, Ultratech Cement, has joined the race to acquire the Holcim stake in Ambuja Cements and its subsidiary, ACC. UltraTech - part of the Aditya Birla Group - submitted a non-binding bid on Wednesday. Swiss multinational Holcim, which manufactures building material, is exiting India by selling its 63.19% stake in Ambuja Cements. According to banking sources, UltraTech has submitted a plan to Holcim, outlining divestiture details that would meet the norms set by anti-trust body Competition Commission of India.
The chairman of the JSW Group of companies, Sajjan Jindal, whose stake in the group is valued at $14.5 billion (Rs 1.1 trillion), is betting $4.5 billion of his personal fortune in the firm's bid for Ambuja Cements. According to bankers, Jindal's contribution will be a combination of share sale and debts raised by pledging the stake of the target entities with private equities. The JSW Group chairman has offered $7 billion for Ambuja Cements, including $2.5 billion of investments from private equities, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday.
The Indian lenders are worried over the fast depleting asset base of the Future group companies which would make their recovery of dues difficult. The asset base of Future group has eroded in the last two years due to lockdown and takeover of 947 stores by rival Reliance Retail after Future group's lease on the properties expired. Bankers said they have approached bankruptcy court so as to avoid any duplication of legal action and reduce time at the legal forums.
Air India, under its new Tata management, has taken a Rs 60,800 crore ($8 billion) cover by paying Rs 266 crore premium to a clutch of insurance companies, including Tata AIG General Insurance. The airline managed to get a better deal as it valued its fleet lower by almost $2 billion. The new management held extensive negotiations - both in India and London, to get a good deal considering the rising premiums due to the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war.
Future group promoter Kishore Biyani's stake fell consistently across group companies since December 2019 after American retail major Amazon infused funds in a Future group promoter entity and the group companies started showing signs of financial distress due to closure of stores due to Covid-19 pandemic. As lenders take Future group companies to the bankruptcy courts to recover their dues under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, the shareholders of Future group companies are staring at complete wipeout of their investments as secured lenders get top priority in any potential recovery, say lawyers. "The fate of all Future group shareholders is now sealed with them looking at a complete loss.
The possible acquisition of Holcim India business will be one of the biggest inbound corporate deals in the country. Currently, Walmart Inc.'s $16-billion acquisition of Flipkart Online Services in 2018 remains the biggest acquisition of an Indian asset by any acquirer, followed by BP plc acquisition of 30 per cent stake in Reliance Industries' 23 oil and gas production blocks in 2011 for $7.2 billion. Bloomberg reported late on Wednesday night that Holcim - the world's biggest cement maker - is considering a potential sale of its India business and gauging interest in its controlling stake in Ambuja Cement.
After years of living with his family in a poky 110 sq. ft. 'house', textile worker Sambhaji Surve dreams of moving into a home four times the size once the Maharashtra government starts its ambitious redevelopment of the 39-acre Kamathipura shanty town in south-central Mumbai. Sharing his dream are about 8,000 other families hoping for a better life when the redevelopment project, part of the government's effort to redevelop old settlements and make life more livable for some residents, gets underway. The Shiv Sena-Nationalist Congress Party aims to redevelop BDD Chawl and Dharavi but for Surve all the matters is Kamathipura where he arrived in the 1970s from Nasik to work in a textile mill. Kamathipura was originally built 150 years ago following construction of a causeway to connect the seven islands of Mumbai. From the British Raj to post-independence, it became infamous for slums and brothels.
Tata AIG, ICICI Lombard and Nippon Life have evinced interest for the profit-making insurance arm of Reliance Capital (RCap), joining several prominent financial companies from India and abroad in the race for RCap's assets. The final day to submit an expression of interest (EoI) was March 25 and the bidders will now get access to the latest information about RCap before they make financial bids.
With the international markets facing uncertainty after Russia invaded Ukraine and Western nations retaliated with sanctions, Indian companies are putting their international fundraising plans on hold as they wait for the markets to recover. Bankers said apart from the geopolitical crisis, international rates are hardening in anticipation of interest rate hikes by the US Federal Reserve to control rising prices in the US. The Ukraine situation has implications for the market. In such a situation, international investors try to shift to safe haven assets by exiting from emerging markets.
The auditor of ABG Shipyard, which is being probed by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) for the Rs 23,000-crore default to banks, had settled an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) by paying a small settlement fee in 2019. The regulator had initiated an investigation into the fund diversion from ABG Shipyard and had asked the auditor to explain why it failed to detect fund diversion in time. In his settlement application, auditor MN Ahmed, partner of Nisar & Kumar, a chartered accountant firm, said he ceased to be an Indian citizen and has retired from the profession.
With the Adani and Jindal groups and Mukesh Ambani-owned Reliance Industries joining the race to buy Videocon Industries' (VIL's) assets, lenders are expecting aggressive bids for VIL's consumer durables and overseas oil assets, which are to be sold in separate auctions. The entire asset sale exercise is expected to be completed in the next six months, said a banker. A promoter entity of Naveen Jindal-owned Jindal Steel and Power has also evinced interest in the second round of bids for VIL's consumer durable business. The deadline to submit bids for VIL's assets ended on February 2.
A hallmark of some new businesses today is that they seek to use the brute force of capital, combined with smart technology and operations, to create new needs that you didn't even know existed, the chairman of Aditya Birla group said in a blog post on the trends for the new year.
Indian companies are expecting generous tax incentives from the Union Budget that will help them invest more in building capacities in the coming years. While the productivity-linked incentives (PLIs) are a good start to spur local manufacturing, the government should also take steps to boost consumer demand, which is not showing encouraging signs, say chief executive officers (CEOs) of India Inc. Statistics released by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) shows that Indian banks had sanctioned loans worth Rs 75,558 crore in 220 new projects - a record low - in the pandemic-hit financial year ending March 2021. This is not showing any signs of a significant pick up in the last nine months of the ongoing financial year.
The group began to outperform the broader market only with the onset of the pandemic in March 2020 while earlier it was largely keeping pace with the Sensex. The group's market cap is up 164.4 per cent since the end of March 2020 against a 105 per cent rally in the Sensex.
Property registrations in Mumbai hit the 100,000-mark till November, marking a 10-year high as "demand enablers" like low prices and cheaper interest rates lure people to buy homes in India's financial capital. The previous 10-year high was 80,746 units in 2018. November 2021 recorded property sale registrations of 7,582 units: an 18 per-cent decline compared to same month last year (YoY) when stamp duty rate was at its lowest level of two per cent, said property consultant Knight Frank India, quoting data from the Maharashtra government's Department of Registrations and Stamps. Compared to October or a month-on-month (MoM) basis, registrations are lower by 12 per cent.
Larsen & Toubro (L&T), India's largest construction and engineering player, has lost as many as 14 large orders in the country because companies that don't possess adequate technical expertise and experience, of late, have won the projects by bidding lower, claimed A M Naik, non-executive chairman of L&T. But the company has made up for the losses by winning projects overseas, where it has acquired a sizeable market share amid tough competition from large global players, he said.
The Reserve Bank of India's action against Reliance Capital comes at a time when the Anil Ambani group was planning to make a comeback with the group company, Reliance Infrastructure, raising funds from the promoter family. As part of the comeback plan, Reliance Infrastructure received Rs 550 crore fund infusion from the Anil Ambani family. A month earlier, Reliance Power, a listed subsidiary of Reliance Infrastructure, also raised funds from its parent by issuing preferential allotment of shares thus increasing the stake of Reliance Infrastructure in the company.
Tata Sons is all set to acquire a residual stake of 16.33 per cent in AirAsia India from its joint venture (JV) partner AirAsia Berhad for $19 million (or Rs 142 crore) by early next year. The valuation is in accordance with the previous transaction under which AirAsia Berhad had sold its 32.6 per cent stake, said a banking source. Tata Group had increased its stake in AirAsia India at a valuation of $115 million.
The groups plan to take on well-entrenched players like Amazon, Flipkart, and Paytm by merging their offline businesses with e-commerce initiatives.
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