Videocon's consumer durable and electronics chain Next has opened nearly 330 stores in the last two and half years, making it the largest chain in the country. Turnover is expected to cross Rs 1,000 crore (Rs 10 billion) in this financial year. Business Standard caught up with Next's Director K S Raman on the company's growth plans.
'It is not that employee work is not happening if you don't see it.'
Being touted as a competitor to the country's busiest Delhi airport -- which handles approximately 1,200 flights a day -- the Noida airport was expected to start flight operations by the end of this year. But supply-chain disruption, caused by pandemic and subsequent global upheaval, has hit the pace of construction at the airport which is coming up in the Jewar area of UP's Gautam Budh Nagar, some 75-km from the Delhi airport.
Indian businesses' weak ability to compete overseas says much about the infirmities imposed by the intensity of government dominance of economic policy and the nature of this dominance, observes Kanika Datta.
Navi Mumbai airport's construction is facing delays, and is likely to commence commercial operations in 2025 instead of 2024, aviation consultancy firm CAPA has said in a report. When asked about this matter, the Adani Group told Business Standard that the Navi Mumbai airport project is "being executed as per scheduled implementation plan and will be operational by the original target date of December, 2024, without any delay". Navi Mumbai International Airport Limited (NMIAL), responsible for both the construction and operation of the airport, is a subsidiary of the Adani Group.
India's financial sector is dominated by large government-owned and private-sector banks.
'We are seeing signs of improvement in rural overall in terms of demand, but I would still keep my fingers crossed.'
At just 12 and a half years old, Manjari won gold in diving at the 1968 national championship in Kanpur, competing against older athletes.
'...you evaluate three key factors before committing your money.'
The move comes barely a week after fellow crypto unicorn CoinDCX laid off 12 per cent of its workforce - an estimated 80 employees - amid challenging macroeconomic conditions and regulatory uncertainty in the sector. CoinSwitch has 519 employees, according to its LinkedIn profile. This means around 8 per cent of its workforce were shown the door.
'In Western UP, last time a lot of Dalits voted for the BJP.' 'This time, there is a rethink among Dalits about the extent of their support for the BJP.'
Google, in its latest appeal to the Supreme Court, has said the Competition Commission of India (CCI) is protecting Amazon's interests after having complained that India's anti-competition body (CCI) had copied part of a European Commission ruling against it for allegedly abusing the market dominance of Android. The latest twist to the Google-CCI case comes as Google filed an appeal in the Supreme Court on June 26, against the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal's (NCLAT's) March 29 order. The tech giant's contention is that the NCLAT failed to apply the "effect analysis" part in the CCI order.
'China need not worry about a truly 'resurgent India'.' 'It's not going to happen.'
The BSA Gold Star is launched....Ola Enters e-motorbikes Biz... Bajaj, TVS To Enter e2Ws Market...
The third quarter (Q3) of 2023-24 (FY24) has proven to be pivotal, witnessing some startups turning profitable and others enhancing their performance as their businesses finally begin to deliver. Startups like Delhivery, Zomato, PolicyBazaar, Mamaearth, and Nykaa have either become profitable or improved their profit margins in Q3FY24. A renewed focus on profitability, supported by operational efficiencies, expense rein-in, and robust demand during the festival season, has empowered companies to strengthen their performance.
A bulk of the Paris-headquartered IT major Capgemini's proposed euro 2 billion investment over three years in artificial intelligence (AI) is coming to India, a top official of the company said here on Wednesday. The three areas where the European tech major is investing are talent acquisitions, talent reskilling and for partnerships and creating a centre of excellence (CoE). "We have announced we will be training 100,000 people by the first half of 2024.
Quick commerce is proving to be a solid business proposition, with companies like Zomato's Blinkit and Y Combinator-backed Zepto recently registering growth, charting paths to profitability. Blinkit logged its highest gross order value (GOV) and customer transactions in June and July, showing a positive contribution for the first time in the quarter ended June 2023. Deepinder Goyal, Zomato's co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO), predicted that Blinkit would deliver more value to shareholders than the core food delivery business in the next decade.
With over 80 million Unified Payments Interface (UPI) users, Amazon Pay, the payments business of e-commerce giant Amazon, has been growing at 40-50 per cent year-on-year (Y-o-Y), said Mahendra Nerurkar, chief executive officer (CEO) and vice-president (V-P), Amazon Pay India. "Leveraging just the micro peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions on UPI is not a business model. "While we have enabled those features, we do not chase monthly active users based on this.
'We've got a huge track record and success in bringing several biosimilars to the market.'
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has become the first Indian company to exceed Rs 5 lakh crore in market capitalisation.
'The fact still remains that we will have to deliver, so the pressure is now on us to make sure we get our resources, our supplies lined up at acceptable costs.'
Vimla Patil always stressed the importance of proving wrong the perception that women were women's worst enemies. And it iss a lesson I carried forward with me all through my career, learning empathy, understanding and ways to help as I went along. Sathya Saran, who succeeded Mrs Patil as Femina's editor, pays homage to the well-known journalist who passed into the ages on September 29, 2024.
A slowdown in hiring by India's top IT companies has resulted in a sharp increase in the industry's profit per employee in Q3FY23. The top four IT companies earned a net profit of 1.7 lakh per employee during October-December 2022, up 8.6 per cent from Rs 1.57 lakh in Q2FY23 and 16.3 per cent from a record low of Rs 1.47 lakh in Q1FY23. Earnings per employee in the third quarter were, however, still down 0.9 per cent on a year-on-year (YoY) basis.
'We carry 6.5 billion passengers every year. We have crossed seven billion this year, and are targeting 10 billion by 2030.'
We asked colleagues, present and past, to reflect on a man who has made such a difference to their lives and careers. Here it is then, a rich collection of memories that offer enchanting glimpses of the enigmatic Ajit Balakrishnan.
'What's sad today is that there are so many people who cannot find work, not because the country is devoid of that opportunity, but because we are not doing enough in the country.'
'The assessment of most people is that there is a stable economic and political environment in India and that is attractive to investors.'
'It is an existential crisis. We cannot recover lost ground through social media. We need to forge alliances and reshape our ideological contours.'
'Rajnath Singh's message was very clear: India's focus is on developing self-reliance.'
The coveted QS rankings indicate that India is slowly but steadily overtaking other nations in the field of education.
'It's an open secret that the UK business is structurally not in a great place.'
Flipkart, the e-commerce company owned by Walmart, is intensifying its efforts to achieve profitability as it is eyeing a valuation of approximately $60 billion at the time of its initial public offering (IPO), now planned in 2025-2026, instead of this year, according to people familiar with the matter. The firm might consider listing in the US or any other geography, including India. The company, which counts the likes of Amazon and Reliance's JioMart among its competitors in India's burgeoning e-commerce market, had also contemplated launching an IPO in 2022-2023.
But the industry's chief executives remain confident of the long-term growth potential of NBFCs in India, given their specialised lending on the asset side, last-mile reach, and a well-capitalised balance sheet. "Over the years, NBFCs have faced many crises.
"We have not lost a single customer in Asia, despite the news (its bankruptcy protection filing in Canada and the US)," said Francois Lancon, President Enterprise EMEA and Asia. He admits, though, that "what works for us (stickiness of clients) also works for our competitors," adding, "The slowing economy is helping us retain clients, since customers don't like taking big decisions like changing vendors during times of uncertainty."
"The factories need consolidation and control as they operate independently with different human resource (HR) and logistic policies. The segmented operations cannot have power and focus on quality," K R Kim, vice-chairman and CEO (global operations), Videocon, who steered LG to market leadership in his earlier stint, told Business Standard.
Bajaj Auto, the king of the market for CNG-powered passenger three-wheelers, now wants to replicate this dominance in two-wheelers. The difference is that while the former is zooming - registrations for CNG-powered passenger three-wheelers nearly doubled during January-December 2023 - the latter, meaning a market for CNG-powered two-wheelers, does not exist.
The government believes firms which are subject to China's laws could be forced to hand over information to Beijing's security services.
'Earnings will be the catalyst for markets to march higher from here on out.'
