Are the big five using their dominance to shut out rivals? That is the key question, says Prosenjit Datta.
Amazon India, Flipkart and Snapdeal are currently locked in a battle for market leadership in the burgeoning Indian e-commerce sector.
In order to determine whether this would be sound strategy for them, one needs to look at two issues: One, on the alliances being built globally between telcos, on one hand, and cloud service firms, on the other, especially with the advent of 5G; and two, how their business strategies in India will blend into with such a deal.
Facebook-owned messaging service WhatsApp has secured regulatory approval for launching its digital payment platform -- WhatApp Pay -- in a phased manner, close to two years after the US-based company's pilot run.
'The economy will pick up in 2020 or a little later... When it picks up, will it reach 10%, 8% or still lower? It all depends on how realistic are the diagnosis and the prescriptions that follow,' says Professor K J Joseph.
Yesteryear film producer F C Mehra passed away late Tuesday night. He had been ailing for a long time, and passed away in his sleep, according to a family friend.
"We are delighted to welcome Google as a strategic investor in Jio Platforms. We have signed a binding partnership and an investment agreement under which Google will invest Rs 33,737 crores for a 7.7 per cent stake in Jio Platforms," Mukesh Ambani said at the company's annual general meeting.
As India's online population crosses 450 million, e-commerce ventures are trying to grab a pie of online sales estimated to hit $48 billion by 2020.
Alibaba founder and executive chairman Jack Ma is this year's biggest financial gainer as the billionaire entrepreneur's fortune has swelled by a whopping $18.5 billion this year to $29.2 billion.
The Alibaba-backed company had introduced the fee on March 8 after it found multiple users using its platform to get free credit by using credit cards to top up their mobile wallets and then transferring the money back to their bank accounts at zero transaction cost.
The country holds one of the biggest opportunities for Uber as more Indians start using smartphones
Eleven global music giants have sued Yahoo! China, owned by e-commerce giant Alibaba, over its alleged involvement in illegal downloading and playing copyrighted music.
This is the sixth consecutive markdown in the valuation of Flipkart by the US firm.
It hopes to leverage the growing number of mobile transactions
VCs have been especially bullish about India.
The event will aim at drawing foreign investment in startups and push local partnerships.
Xi will later head for New York to attend the UN General Assembly session.
The Walmart chief stated that the values of the two companies were "very much aligned"
With more than 10,000 stores under the various Reliance retail brands and over 2.5 million kirana stores already tying up with it, Jio's online marketplace would have the biggest hyperlocal logistics network in the country.
The deal, as well as some other strategic and financial investments in works, will help Ambani cut debt at RIL.
Regulators will need to allow the model to evolve to allow profits to flow, says Una Gulani.
As Indians scrambled to exchange the banned notes for new currency, Paytm, Sharma's digital payments startup, went on a promotional spree, inviting Indians to start using Paytm's digital wallet to pay for everyday goods and services.
India's Internet economy has two choices: An immediate $30 billion Sale-and-Leaseback or a $3 trillion value harvesting over decades, observes Vibhu Arya.
Their move follows an activist campaign by hedge fund Starboard Value LP, which is pushing Yahoo to consider a deal with AOL and unlock Yahoo's valuable stakes in Asian Web companies.
Last year, traffic jumped 15 times on Snapdeal's 'Big Sale Day' on Oct 6, when it had clocked Rs 1 crore a minute of sales over 10 hours.
Fintechs need to behave with responsibility and transparency. A lot of mis-selling has been happening. Other issues have been plaguing the fledgling industry -- high interest rates, even higher processing fees, harsh collection process and, most critically, data leakage leading to rampant frauds, points out Tamal Bandyopadhyay.
Singapore-based SkyQuestCom received the Deloitte Fast Tech 500 award for being the seventh fastest growing company in the Asia Pacific region. \n
Prominent print advertisements on Monday pitched Amazon's discount strategy against Flipkart's.
Pocket Aces creates content across 3 channels and reaches over 40 million people weekly on its own properties
Three UCLA men's basketball players were arrested in China for shoplifting on Tuesday, a day ahead of US President Donald Trump's first official visit there, according to several media reports.
After the Ladakh fiasco where Xi Jinping did not expect the Indian Army to resist his land-grabbing tactics, he has to save face before his colleagues in the Communist party.' To bring the threat of a mega-dam to the northern Indian border is a clever move, observes Claude Arpi.
Estimates suggest Sina Weibo has over 500 million users.
'It is inevitable that people around the world -- including from America and China -- will have different viewpoints over different issues'
This year, PhonePe is focussed on bringing more partners across categories, including travel, commute, food, hyper-local, retail and entertainment on the platform.
Experts say data localisation and sharing is probably the single-biggest detriment that the draft policy talks about, the rest have no or minor repercussions on the players
His investment in Paytm is in his personal capacity.
'We've seen tremendous traction from fruit and vegetables.' 'Around 18% of our business comes from these, almost three times higher than physical stores.'
In about a year, top e-commerce companies are expected to raise as much funds as the three sector leaders raised in about five years.
These stocks are overvalued and, therefore, one should not adopt a buy and hold strategy.
Alnoor Peermohamed & Raghu Krishnan find out why the new CEO is said to be the perfect man for turning around Flipkart's fortunes.
