Armed with swanky showrooms, decked with plush fixtures, and offering indulgences such as high-end perfumes and customisable accessories, BMW, Mercedes, Audi are rolling out the red carpet for the well-heeled.
US e-commerce major Amazon Wednesday apprehended the "disappearance" of assets and sought an interim order from the Supreme Court to ensure the preservation of assets of Future Retail Ltd besides resumption of arbitration over FRL's merger deal with Reliance Retail. A bench comprising Chief Justice N V Ramana and Justices A S Bopanna and Hima Kohli took note of the allegations of the US firm that the "applecart was being upset" by its rivals and asked the Future group firms, FRL and Future Coupons Ltd (FCPL), to respond to the interim plea of Amazon seeking resumption of arbitration and preservation of assets and fixed the hearing on March 23. Amazon and Future group are engaged in multi-forum litigations on the issue of FRL's merger deal to the tune of Rs 24,500 crore with Reliance Retail Ltd after the US e-commerce giant dragged the latter to arbitration at the Singapore International Arbitration Centre (SIAC) in October 2020.
India and the US are expected to have smooth trade negotiations after US President Donald Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi had a productive meeting during Modi's visit to the White House last month, Stephen A Schwarzman, chairman, chief executive officer, and co-founder of one of the world's largest alternative investment firms, Blackstone Group, said in Mumbai on Wednesday.
Heightened volatility and lacklustre returns continue to make a dent in retail participation in the equities cash market segment. The percentage of retail participation in the average daily turnover in the National Stock Exchange's (NSE's) cash segment has come down to 40.8 per cent in February 2023, from 52 per cent a year ago. At the peak, retail investors accounted for nearly two-thirds of cash market volumes in July 2020.
Among the new entries, the largest by market capitalisation are LIC, Avenue Supermarts (DMart), Adani Green Energy, Zomato and Jio Financial Services.
'This is the Bengal story, where businesses are nurtured, dreams are realised, and legacies are built.'
FOMO-driven investing is reshaping India's stock market. Swati Saxena explains how social media hype fuels risky bets and how to protect your wealth.
Intuitively solving a problem like multiplying 43 by 11, they might first multiply 43 by 10, and then add 43, reaching the final answer of 473.
Apple will next week open its first retail store in India, in signs of importance the iPhone manufacturer attaches to the world's fastest growing smartphones market. The company will open its first official store in Mumbai on April 18 and the second in Delhi on April 20. The company at present sells its products in India through exclusive Apple Premium Reseller (APR) stores, large format retail chains like Reliance Digital, Croma etc, mutli-brand retail stores and through e-commerce platforms.
The bigger threat for DMart is that the Reliance-Future combine now has grocery revenues that are nearly 2.5 times of it, putting pressure on the former to improve stickiness of its consumers.
According to the plan made by the lenders and RIL, all Future group listed companies will be merged into Future Enterprises. RIL will then invest Rs 8,500 crore in the merged entity which will include the retail business.
Gold prices slumped for the second straight session by Rs 1,150 to Rs 78,350 per 10 grams in the national capital on Monday on frantic selling by stockists and retailers, the All India Sarafa Association said. The precious metal of 99.9 per cent purity closed at Rs 79,500 per 10 grams on Friday.
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Tuesday said the securities transaction tax (STT) will be increased on futures and options (F&O) trade from October 1 to discourage retail investors from investing in the risky instrument.
Reserve Bank Governor Shaktikanta Das on Friday said that this stage would have been "premature" and "very very risky" as the retail inflation is still high, and future monetary policy action would depend upon the income data and outlook. Earlier this month, the RBI continued to maintain the status quo in the short-term lending interest rate (repo), citing inflationary concerns, though it changed the monetary policy stance to neutral.
iPhone maker Apple on Friday said it will open four more stores in India, located in Pune, Bengaluru, Delhi-NCR and Mumbai. The company said it will also roll out its first-ever "made in India" iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max series devices this month.
The Delhi high court on Friday declined Future Group's plea for stay on an arbitration tribunal order refusing to interfere with the Emergency Award (EA) which restrained it from going ahead with the Rs 24,731 crore merger deal with Reliance Retail. Justice Suresh Kumar Kait sought response from US-based e-commerce giant Amazon which had challenged the merger before the Singapore arbitration tribunal under SIAC, and listed the appeals by Future Coupons Pvt Ltd (FCPL) and Future Retail Ltd (FRL) for further hearing on January 4. Senior counsel Harish Salve, appearing for FRL, urged the court to pass an interim order clarifying that an earlier order passed by the Supreme Court - which stayed all proceedings in relation to the enforcement of the EA - would remain in force despite the subsequent order passed by the duly constituted arbitration tribunal.
'Before you work on your business plan, before you build your team, you should have a clear idea about what your product is, who your customer is, how valuable the product is, and whether the market is deep and wide.'
The latest trigger has been Future group's buyout talk with the retail unit of Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu's family-owned Heritage Foods
'I believe that the overall demand for commercial vehicles will improve, even though there is a slowdown in the GDP.'
The FMCG industry hopes for a revival in consumption growth in 2025 with some 'green shoots' already visible, after having a challenging year amid escalating input costs and a double-digit rise in food inflation, which ultimately slowed down the pace of the urban market growth in the second half of 2024. Soaring prices of commodities such as palm oil, coffee, cocoa and wheat forced FMCG players to go for a hike of 3 to 5 per cent or resort to shrinkflation by reducing pack sizes and grammage to retain attractive price points, fearing a volume loss.
Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman's call for making lending rates affordable may not resonate anytime soon as banks still struggle with margin compression, and await clues from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on liquidity and rate action. Hinting that any lending rate cut was some time away, State Bank of India (SBI) managing director Vinay M Tonse said there was still some aggression in the market regarding deposit pricing.
T E Narasimhan/Business Standard reports from Chennai on how the Future group plans to shore up its small store network in the South.
The rapid rise of quick commerce is anticipated to create a substantial increase in the need for blue-collar workers, with India projected to require 2.4 million jobs by 2027, according to job matching and hiring platform Indeed. Quick commerce companies hired over 40,000 employees in the last quarter to handle increased festive shopping and e-commerce demand, Indeed India Sales Head Sashi Kumar said.
Future Retail's (FRL's) independent directors have written a second letter to the Competition Commission of India (CCI), stating American e-commerce major Amazon never intended to invest in Future Coupons (FCPL) and the representations made by the US e-commerce player were completely opposite and contradictory to their own internal correspondences as submitted before courts. The directors also wrote to CCI that Amazon has obtained approval by making deliberate misrepresentations. By actively misleading the CCI and the regulator, it has to revoke the approval granted for Amazon's investment in FCPL.
Bengaluru dominated as the country's top city for job opportunities and salary growth as it has registered a 9.3 per cent year-on-year increase, closely followed by Chennai and Delhi, a report said on Thursday. This growth underlines Bengaluru's reputation as a technology and business hub as the average monthly unified salary in the city stood at Rs 29,500, making it the highest-paying city in the country, according to TeamLease Services Jobs and Salaries Primer report for FY24. The report is based on an analysis of unified salaries across temporary and permanent hiring markets.
Tomato prices have been on the boil for more than a month. Data from major cities show that the spike has been between 125 and 150 per cent at the wholesale level. Soaring vegetable prices, including tomatoes, pushed the retail inflation rate to a nine-month high of 5.49 per cent in September, according to government data. Though reports say prices are expected to come down in the next few weeks after supplies improve from Madhya Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh, how long will the respite last is anybody's guess.
Retail inflation declined to a 25-month low of 4.25 per cent in May mainly on account of softening prices of food and fuel items, with experts saying that RBI is expected to hold interest rates steady in the current fiscal. This is the fourth straight month when retail inflation has declined and the third straight month of Consumer Price Index (CPI) based inflation remaining within the RBI's comfort zone of below 6 per cent. CPI-based inflation stood at 4.7 per cent in April and 7.04 per cent in May 2022.
With just four trading sessions to go for the ITC-ITC Hotels demerger record date shares of ITC continue to consolidate in a thin range of Rs 460 - Rs 480 in an otherwise volatile equity market. On Tuesday thus far despite a near 1 per cent fall in the Sensex and Nifty; ITC traded on a flat note. ITC had set the demerger ratio at 1:10 - meaning 1 share of ITC Hotels for every 10 shares of ITC as of the record date January 6, 2025.
Did top Indian business groups miss the e-commerce opportunity by focusing on replicating the Walmart model instead of following the Amazon model of online shopping?
The Delhi high court on Thursday upheld the Singapore Emergency Arbitrator's (EA) order restraining Future Retail Ltd (FRL) from going ahead with its Rs 24,713 crore deal with Reliance Retail to sell its business, which was objected to by US-based e-commence giant Amazon.
The National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT) on Monday adjourned till February 25, the hearing on the plea of e-commerce major Amazon, seeking an interim stay over the order passed by fair trade regulator CCI, which suspended the over-two-year-old approval for its deal with Future Coupons Pvt Ltd (FCPL). When the matter was called for hearing, a two-member bench expressed its difficulties to take up the matter on Monday, as one of the members is retiring in the next four days, after completing his tenure. In this matter, NCLAT would also have to hear other parties such as fair trade regulator CCI, before passing an order and it would take some more time and then the retiring member would not be a part of the bench.
At the heart of the matter are revenue-share rental agreements that retailers are mooting over fixed-rent contracts that they say are unsustainable, given the revenue loss they've suffered during the lockdown.
Debt-ridden Future Group on Friday said it will sell part of its stake in Amar Chitra Katha Pvt Ltd (ACKPL), which publishes Amar Chitra Katha comics, for Rs 13.62 crore. It has entered into definitive agreements on Thursday to dispose of part of its investments held in ACKPL constituting to 18.58 per cent of the total paid-up share capital of ACKPL to Ramanaidu Daggubati and Spirit Media, according to a regulatory filing. Future Consumer Ltd (FCL), part of the Future Group, will be offloading the stake.
'If you see another 1000-point correction, people may start panicking.'
In 2020-21, business activities were hit by the coronavirus pandemic. Biyani's annual remuneration stood at Rs 3.86 crore in 2019-20, according to Future Retail Ltd's (FRL) annual report for 2020-21. FRL's managing director Rakesh Biyani also saw his remuneration decline by 4.82 per cent to Rs 3.75 crore in the financial year ended March 31, 2021.
Under its door-step delivery model, consumers can shop at any of the three Future Group-owned convenience formats - Easyday, Nilgiris and Heritage - both online or offline.
Chinese smartphone maker OnePlus on Thursday said it plans to invest up to Rs 6,000 crore in its India business over the next three years. The company plans to make the investment in tranches of Rs 2,000 crore annually for the next three years under 'Project Starlight'. OnePlus on Thursday announced an annual investment of Rs 2,000 crore over the next three years to accelerate innovations in products and services in India.
Why is Shailesh Chandra, managing director of Tata Motors Passenger Vehicles and Tata Passenger Electric Mobility, not worried about the competition?
'Everything can be resolved, but my husband's legacy is not up for sale.'
Some analysts believe convenience stores could be challenged by digital grocery in the future.
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