'The toughest challenge is not to satisfy the luxury customer.' 'The toughest challenge is to satisfy the budget customer.'
Having established its presence in the country, luxury carmaker Lexus is now looking to chart its next phase of growth in India as it looks to consolidate sales network and drive in new models, including fully electric cars in the country, according to a top company official. The company, which is the luxury car arm of Japanese auto major Toyota, initiated operations in India in 2017 and currently sells seven models in the country, including the locally-produced ES 300h sedan. Known for its self charging hybrid cars, the company is now gearing up to drive in battery electric vehicles, besides ramping up its existing product portfolio in the market.
Bootstrapping has put Nithin Kamath of Zerodha in a position where he can trifle with talk about valuation, points out Suveen Sinha.
E-commerce players also realise the value proposition women employees bring to the table.
Of the 2,562 customer complaints received between January 2020 and March 2021, a majority relate to illegal apps. At least two dozen suicide cases have been reported, perpetrated by the harassment by loan app operators, points out Tamal Bandyopadhyay.
German automotive giant Volkswagen (VW) has said it will focus on the premium sedan/sport utility vehicle (SUV) segment and avoid the mass hatchback segment. "Customers don't expect anything less than a premium product from VW. "Customers expect a certain level of quality and driving dynamics. We have to stay true to that DNA. "The day we go mass, customers will reject us," says Ashish Gupta, brand director, VW India.
Recently, world headlines buzzed with Elon Musk's announcement that he was shelving his audacious bid for social media platform Twitter. Away from the media spotlight, questions are being asked about the maverick billionaire's plans in India, too. A few days ago, a Reuters report said Musk's flagship Tesla had put on hold its plan to launch electric cars in India.
The failure of SVB was due to idiosyncratic reasons, but shows how higher rates can expose fault lines in unforeseen places, observes Neelkanth Mishra.
Can this growth in GST collection be sustained in the coming years? asks A K Bhattacharya.
Engineers based in India are estimated to be writing roughly 35 per cent of the 100 million lines of codes required to develop one fully driverless car for global vehicle makers.
The increasing involvement of Big Tech in the financial system could give rise to concentration risk and there are potential spillovers, which call for closer attention, Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor Shaktikanta Das said on Tuesday. "...enormous amounts of consumer data is being generated and leveraged upon by a few entities (the so-called Big Tech) by virtue of their huge customer base. "Such developments raise concerns on concentration risk and potential spillovers as their level of engagement with the financial system strengthens in the years to come," Das said at the Global Fintech Fest 2022.
Tamal Bandyopadhyay details HDFC Bank's digital journey.
Twenty years after India's insurance sector was opened up, unshackling the control of state-owned companies, as many as 50 private players have set up shop. Along with their foreign partners, private players have brought about a sea change in the product offering, distribution and underwriting processes, and services levels. Yet, India's insurance penetration needle has not moved much.
'Every telecom user wishes to know who is calling. This will help in preventing cyber frauds using telecom services.'
'There have been many cases where clients have indicated that they feel suicidal as they feel they have no other options to deal with their financial hardship.'
The two IT majors -- Infosys and TCS -- delivered disappointing results for the fourth quarter of the 2022-23 financial year (Q4FY23). Poor macro conditions and weak sentiment in the banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) space accounted for the miss. For TCS, revenue in constant currency (CC) terms grew at 0.6 per cent on a quarter-on-quarter (QoQ) basis. Weakness was visible in North America, primarily due to deferred discretionary spending.
Tata Motors on Wednesday launched its Tiago EV with introductory prices for first 10,000 customers ranging between Rs 8.49-11.79 lakh
'As long as businesses do not consider cyber recovery an integral part of their enterprise IT, they remain greatly vulnerable.'
LIC identifies the problems well, but what the markets will watch is how nimble it is with the solutions.
Talks on with P&G, HUL, Patanjali, among others to push their products via 250,000 common centres
'Each state and central government body may be asked to update its system to ensure PAN is used as a common identification to access its services.'
Axis Bank's acquisition of Citibank's consumer finance business for Rs 12,325 crore - the second biggest deal in the Indian banking sector - is seen as a good deal at a good price. The acquisition enables Axis Bank to close the gap with competition in some key segments such as credit cards. At the same time, there are some key issues that are crucial for the deal's success, apart from the fact that it will take some time for Axis to reap the full harvest of its investment.
Maruti is not an online outlier, of course; other heavyweights have rolled out similar services. But as an analyst pointed out, Maruti's all-India roll-out has significant impact given that it accounts for over half of all cars sold, reports, reports Pavan Lall.
Walmart-owned digital payments firm PhonePe has decided to halt its proposed acquisition of Goldman Sachs- and Xiaomi-backed ZestMoney, a Bengaluru-based buy now, pay later (BNPL) platform. The deal, which was poised to fetch anywhere between $150-200 million and $300 million, has hit a snag over lapses in due diligence, disagreements over valuation, sustainability of the business, and shareholding structure of ZestMoney, according to people familiar with the matter. The collapse of the deal is also being attributed to a slowdown in the financial technology (fintech) sector in the midst of a funding winter, difficult regulatory environment, and macroeconomic uncertainty, informed other sources.
'The financial sector's performance in the first two quarters was a revelation.' 'It clearly showed the clean-up had been done in the past one-and-a-half years and that capital brought in was significantly stronger.'
Gujarat and Karnataka have been ranked as the best performers in developing startup ecosystem for budding entrepreneurs, according to the ranking of states and Union territories by the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT). Among smaller states having population of less than one crore, Meghalaya has been adjudged as the best performer. The rankings are based on the initiatives taken to develop the startup ecosystem for promoting budding entrepreneurs.
The regulatory changes brought in by the insurance regulator and the amendments proposed to the Insurance Act by the Centre may herald a new dawn for the sector in India. This may result in insurers bringing out more consumer-led products, top honchos of general insurance companies of the country concurred at the Business Standard BFSI Insight Summit 2022.
E-commerce companies managed to beat the odds by adopting a flexible approach in terms of transforming their business models and leveraging emerging technologies. They had to constantly align their objectives with evolving customer needs. With companies hiring thousands of temporary workers, expanding to smaller cities, and launching new products, e-commerce giants gird up to celebrate the peak festival season without Covid restrictions after a three-year time-out.
The share of non-resident Indians (NRIs) and overseas investors in Indian mutual funds has been declining over time, despite adding half-a-trillion rupees to holdings over the last five years. Mutual fund holdings for the segment went up from Rs 0.95 trillion as of December 2018 to Rs 1.54 trillion as of December 2022, shows Business Standard analysis of data from the industry body Association of Mutual Funds in India (Amfi). Their share in overall mutual fund assets has fallen from 4.2 per cent to 3.9 per cent during the same period.
Commemorating 75 years of India's independence, SBI has launched a 75-day Utsav Deposit Scheme, offering 6.10 per cent for fixed deposits. Senior citizens will get an additional 0.50 per cent and the offer is on until October 30, SBI said.
TCS is confident of achieving a double-digit revenue growth in the current fiscal and will be targeting a similar performance in FY24 as well, a senior executive said on Tuesday. The largest IT services exporter's ability to achieve the number in FY24 will hinge on how the macroeconomic situation, including geopolitical tensions, commodity price pressures, inflation and financial tightening worries, play out, chief operating officer N Ganapathy Subramaniam told PTI. "(For) this year (FY23), probably we are there (double-digit growth).
Trade union leaders claimed that the strike would be even bigger than the one last year as the number of striking workers is expected to swell to 18 crore
The maiden mission of Skyroot Aerospace, named 'Prarambh' (the beginning), will carry payloads of two Indian and one foreign customers and is set for launch from the Indian Space Research Organisation's launchpad at Sriharikota.
'While we have done a few thousand kilometres in India, most of the testing and data collection and analysis has been done in the US, Japan and Europe.'
'India has a lot of potential, not just in commercial aspects, but also in hiring of people and sourcing of products.'
Nearly a decade ago, the first fully electric vehicle (EV) caught fire on the road in the US. It was a model from Tesla, the world's most admired EV maker. A metal fragment punctured the underbelly of the vehicle, penetrating its battery pack, leading to a fire. Indian lawmakers and automakers have had nine years to study the incident (in fact, three Tesla Model Ss caught fire in two months in 2013) but seem to have learnt little.
The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the Goods and Service Tax (GST) Council's recommendations are not binding on Union and State but have a persuasive value as the country has a cooperative federal structure.
'While many policies say that they will cover mental illnesses, the wordings of a few still have mental illness as a permanent exclusion.' 'After the new IRDAI circular, such exclusions should go away.'
Reserve Bank of India Governor Shaktikanta Das tells Anup Roy, Raghu Mohan and Niraj Bhatt that it is time for banks to lower interest rates and start lending to cash-starved finance companies after due credit appraisal and proper risk assessment.
Audi's strategy seems to point to pushing technology to directly connect with consumers using digital platforms and marketing to synchromesh into one seamless experience, says Pavan Lall.
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