The sobering news is that retailers - including big firms like Reliance Retail - and exhibitors are contemplating issuing force majeure notices to shopping malls and real estate owners, and are in discussions with them to formulate an action plan for sharing the financial burden of the lockdown.
'If many start-ups lose in this environment, there will be less number of people willing to start new businesses.'
Over the past week, several unusual partnerships among start-ups, traditional businesses and hospitals have been announced, and several more are likely to materialise soon. The trend could see increased importance of gig workers, who are taking considerable risk to deliver goods to people in the time of a pandemic.
For now, Bounce, Shuttl, Fab Hotels, Instamojo, Zomato, Curefit, and HealthifyMe, among others, are going for salary deductions. Most of the consumer internet start-ups, besides those who are in the grocery delivery, education tech, and video conferencing business, would ultimately lay-off people and cut back salaries.
'In the first phase, you might allow 30 per cent of the workforce to come in and see how it goes,' says industrialist Harsh Goenka.
Despite the failure of most e-commerce players to meet orders through the first week of the lockdown, there has been no serious crisis, thanks to supplies from 11 million small kirana and mom-and-pop stores across the country with the support of over 300,000 distributors and wholesalers.
'When 99.9 per cent of the most vulnerable are above 65, I see no logic in this sweeping lockdown in a country in which 94 per cent are below 65.' 'The most sensible thing to do would be to recalibrate this unnecessary lockdown as soon as possible.'
The Customs clearance required for moving equipment like laptops, desktops, etc out of SEZ units was delaying things as the clearance had to be taken in person after a first level of approval online.
DOIT is a 100 per cent subsidiary of Morgan Credits in which Rana Kapoor's daughters Radha, Roshini and Raakhe, are directors. In 2018-19, the company incurred a net loss of Rs 48.76 crore on revenues of Rs 59 crore - a sharp contrast to 2017-18 when it had profits of Rs 2.7 crore on revenues of Rs 43 crore. To fund these aggressive investments into its subsidiaries in 2018-19, DOIT used debt which doubled to Rs 600 crore in 2018-19 from the previous year.
Feedback from telecom members indicated a 10 per cent increase in traffic, but no fears of choked networks. Telcos currently use 65-70 per cent of the network capacity. In other words, they have enough additional capacity to handle the new pressure without clogging the system.
According to a survey by community platform LocalCircles, early-stage start-ups, funding dependent start-ups and many small businesses will soon be fighting for survival as the spurt in coronavirus cases hits them hard.
According to experts in human resources, even joining of new graduates is likely to be staggered as companies are expected to onboard staffers after gauging the demand scenario.
Bengaluru-based Healthtech start-up Mfine has rolled out a coronavirus assessment feature which enables virtual medical consultation to assess patients who have flu-like symptoms. Portea and Haptik habe developed chatbots, which will disseminate information related to coronavirus.
The issues include not getting refunds on airline and hotel bookings, getting charged a service fee even if airlines have waived cancellation charges and so on. Complaints are piling up on Twitter, Facebook and other social media channels as more and more people cancel their travel plans due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.
Apart from such advisory, IT biggies such as TCS, Infosys and HCL Tech among others have been pursuing 'remote working' model to overcome the situation.
After a gruelling 24 hours, the PhonePe team has fully restored UPI on the payment platform. The app is up and running again with ICICI Bank as its new partner with all payment instruments enabled.
In terms of market capitalisation, Zee alone has a market cap of Rs 24,000 crore compared to Rs 15,000 crore of the merged Reliance entity.
Google had started the Station as a five-year partnership with the Indian Railways and RailTel in 2015 to provide fast, free WiFi in over 400 stations by mid-2020.
Based on Statista data for 2019, Vodafone has 17.2 million subscribers in the UK, 29.5 million in Germany, and over 13.7 million in Spain. Without Voda Idea, the Group will become smaller than Airtel and Jio.
The Indian market is more in sync with mobile markets of advanced countries like the UK, Japan, and South Korea, where there are fewer players - three to four.
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