Loan against gold as a product is catching on fast. Let's keep the momentum going, but aim for sustainable growth. A few bad apples should not ruin the brunch, argues Tamal Bandyopadhyay.
The analyst community tracking the Indian IT services industry took special note of Accenture's first quarter (Q1) performance, which showcased the rapid growth of its consulting business that outperformed its outsourcing business. Bookings indicate that the trend will continue. Consulting bookings increased 41.6 per cent year-on-year (yoy) to $9.4 billion, higher than the 17.6 per cent growth in outsourcing to $7.4 billion. The management commentary was also more bullish on the consulting business.
Conversion of debt of the stressed telecom player Vodafone Idea Ltd (VIL) into equity could be an option to emerge out of the crisis, lenders led by State Bank of India (SBI) have suggested to Department of Telecommunications (DoT). DoT had called senior bank officials on Friday to discuss the stress in the telecom sector arising out of the Supreme Court order last month on the adjusted gross revenue (AGR)-related dues payable by telecom majors, including Vodafone Idea and Bharti Airtel, sources said. The top court has given a time period of 10 years to telecom service providers struggling to pay Rs 93,520 crore of AGR-related dues to clear their outstanding amount to the government.
Disney+ Hotstar reported its biggest decline in paid subscribers to date - a fall of 3.8 million subscribers, or 6 per cent of its total - in the October-December period. The drop in numbers came after two warnings by the company that Hotstar's paid subscriber base would shrink as it didn't have streaming rights for the Indian Premier League (IPL) for the 2023-27 media cycle. The IPL would start on April 1 this year and continue till May 28.
The government plans to transfer all subsidies including food, fertiliser and kerosene, potentially taking direct payments to more than $60 billion.
At a time when consumers increasingly embrace green mobility solutions, it is not electric cars but hybrids that are taking the lead, as automotive sales data indicate. Since January, 64,097 electric cars have been sold compared to 266,465 hybrids, according to data from the ministry of road transport and highways' Vahan dashboard. Hybrid car sales have surged from 4.42 per cent of the 4.1 million cars sold in calendar year 2022 to 7.2 per cent this year.
From March 3, investors in India will be able to trade in select US stocks through the NSE International Exchange (NSE IFSC), a wholly owned subsidiary of the National Stock Exchange (NSE). Investors can invest in NSE IFSC receipts on US stocks, which will be in the form of unsponsored depository receipts (DRs). For a start, this will include DRs of 50 US stocks such as Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Tesla, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, Nike, P&G, Coca-Cola, and Exxon Mobil. Indian retail investors will be able to transact on the NSE IFSC platform under the Liberalised Remittance Scheme (LRS) limits prescribed by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), which currently stand at $250,000 per year.
'If individual stocks start falling 25% to 30% or more, then I doubt how many of them will be able to withstand that (kind of selloff). That is when you'll see panic coming in.'
Dixon Technologies right now is a beehive of activity. It is building a new facility in Noida to make 1.3 million laptops for Taiwanese PC maker Acer. The facility must be up and running in four months. The pace of activity will only increase. Last week Dixon won a similar contract from Lenovo, the Chinese personal computer maker and the third largest information technology (IT) hardware brand in India, to assemble laptops and notebooks. Though the clientele in these two cases is Taiwanese and Chinese, Dixon is a company reaching for the stars with its feet planted firmly in the Indian government's policy.
At a time when consumers increasingly embrace green mobility solutions, it is not electric cars but hybrids that are taking the lead, as automotive sales data indicate. Since January, 64,097 electric cars have been sold compared to 266,465 hybrids, according to data from the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways' Vahan dashboard. Hybrid car sales have surged from 4.42 per cent of the 4.1 million cars sold in calendar year 2022 to 7.2 per cent this year.
The government's target of hitting $52 billion to $58 billion in mobile phone exports in FY26 has been faltering; an Indian corporate group with financial muscle will help.
The banking sector emerged as an outlier when the rest of India Inc witnessed a slowdown in earnings in FY23. The combined net profit of listed public and private sector banks was up 39.4 per cent year-on-year (YoY) last financial year and their share in India's gross value added (GVA) or gross domestic product (GDP) at factor cost rose to a record high of nearly 1 per cent up, from 0.8 per cent a year ago. Listed banks' combined net profit grew to Rs 2.36 trillion in FY23, from Rs 1.69 trillion a year ago. In comparison, India GVA at current prices was up 15.2 per cent YoY at Rs 247 trillion in FY23; it was around Rs 214 trillion a year ago.
In the first such collaboration for India, the country's flagship payments platform, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), and Singapore's PayNow payment system have launched a real-time cross-border payment linkage system. The linkage, which was launched by Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi and Singapore's PM Lee Hsien Loong on Tuesday, was kicked off by a live cross-border transaction between Reserve Bank of India Governor Shaktikanta Das and Monetary Authority of Singapore managing director Ravi Menon, using mobile phones.
Friday will be a landmark day for domestic markets, with all the listed stocks entering the professed T+1 (trading plus one day) settlement cycle. About 200 stocks, which account for more than 80 per cent of India's market capitalisation, will be settled on a next-day basis, with effect from January 27. This will evidently complete the transition to the T+1 cycle that started in February 2022 with the bottom 500 stocks in terms of market value.
Ahluwalia is not a great fan of the Uber model.
The relationship between the US and India has been very productive, in particular on the trade and technology front, and 2023 can be considered the best year historically for bilateral ties, according to a former top American trade official. Arun Kumar, an Indian-American, who served as the assistant secretary of Commerce for Global Markets and director general of the US and Foreign Commercial Service (USFCS) during the Obama administration, said this during an interview with PTI in Washington. "Looking back on 2023, it was a very productive year for the US-India relationship, by many accounts the best year historically," he said.
India on Thursday approved proposals for purchasing 26 Naval variant of Rafale jets from France and procuring three French-designed Scorpene class submarines, a day ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's wide-ranging talks with French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris.
The Biden administration has proposed a massive hike in immigration fees, including the much sought-after H-1B visas for high-skilled foreign workers, which is very popular among Indian tech professionals. Under the proposed rule, published by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) on Wednesday, the application for the H-1B visa increases from $460 to $780, and L-1 from $460 to $1,385. The application fee for O-1 visas has been proposed to increase from $460 to $1,055.
New age diagnostic tools come in handy for BharatBenz to predict repair needs and breakdown in advance.
The Indian IT industry will stage a "strong recovery" in 2021-22 with a revenue growth of up to 11 per cent, ratings agency Crisil said on Wednesday. The recovery will be led by increasing outsourcing and accelerating digital transformation services mainly in sectors such as banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), healthcare, retail and manufacturing, it said. As per Nasscom, the IT services industry grew 2.7 per cent to $99 billion in 2020-21.
'The first duty of the government is to learn lessons from a bad experience and course correct. It's a pity that the government is making policy without looking at evidence and differentiating between immediate and urgent.'
'Earlier in my career DGs were nearly 100 per cent honest.' 'By the time I retired, many DGs have not been honest.' 'One DG asking me to go and meet a home minister whom everybody knew is a corrupt guy.' '
Available evidence suggests that we are on the way to a very costly failure of the current demonetisation scheme, says M R Narayana.
The award-winning journalist was killed in July last while covering clashes between Afghan troops and the Taliban in Spin Boldak district of Kandahar city.
Adani Group is expected to report a 20 per cent rise in its earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation (Ebitda) at Rs 61,200 crore for the year that ended in March 2023 (2022-23, or FY23), according to a note submitted by the group to lenders recently. The group had earned Ebitda of Rs 57,299 crore in the preceding financial year that ended in March 2022 (2021-22). The group's gross debt was Rs 2.27 trillion as of March 31, 2023, and has projected to not take on additional debt until it lowers its existing one.
Why did the company zero in on RBL Bank to understand the business of banking? While the M&M investors heaved a sigh of relief, one gentleman must have been all smiles after this, RBL Bank MD and CEO R Subramaniakumar, notes Tamal Bandyopadhyay.
In the June quarter of FY24, 51 per cent of consumers who took small-ticket personal loans already had more than four credit products at the time of accessing yet another new loan, compared with just 17 per cent in the June quarter of FY20, points out Tamal Bandyopadhyay.
The rally in PSBs, analysts feel, was more a knee-jerk reaction to the development, and the actual benefits will start to accrue once the addition takes place in 2024. "The actual benefit for banks from the inclusion in JP Morgan's EM Index will accrue from June 2024 onwards. "Until then, the larger fundamentals of the market will dictate the moves. "Once the initial euphoria subsides, bond markets will look to global cues which may trigger fresh selling," said Siddharth Khemka, head of retail research, Motilal Oswal Financial Services.
'Rhetoric and chest-thumping are running high on India's recent growth record.'
'But will the giant waves developing elsewhere allow us to sail smoothly into fair winds?' asks Debashis Basu.
Indian airlines are expected to post a consolidated loss of $4.1 billion this fiscal, similar to what they are estimated to have incurred in 2020-21, taking the total losses of two years to around $8 billion as a result of the pandemic so far, aviation consultancy and research firm CAPA said on Thursday. In a report, CAPA expects domestic passenger traffic to be around 80-95 million in 2021-22 as against 52.5 million in the previous financial year. However, despite this growth, it will be well below than around 140 million passenger volumes recorded in 2019-20, CAPA said in the report. This projection of the traffic volume does not take into account the anticipated third wave of the pandemic, it added.
It would not be surprising if India, the world's largest producer of milk, has to resort to imports to meet the elevated summer demand, states Surinder Sud.
With the merger between HDFC Bank and HDFC Ltd complete, analysts said the next key monitorable for the Street would be successful resolution of merger-related hiccups, including employee-related churn and roll out of complete banking services across branches. At the bourses, they expect the stock to perform in-line with the benchmark indices in the near-term. "There's usually an initial period of consolidation after a merger as the entities work towards integration.
Of the 3.9 million the sector employs, HR experts say at least 100,000 are likely to lose their jobs by the end of this financial year. Ayan Pramanik and Raghu Krishnan report.
The study says the entire supply chain of goods and services will suffer a massive liquidity shock.
Notwithstanding expectations of a pick-up in construction activity during a seasonally strong January-March quarter (fourth quarter) of 2022-23 (FY23), analysts are cautiously optimistic about the building material sector - encompassing paints, pipes, wood panels, tiles, metals, and cement - as volatile input costs, coupled with fears of a global slowdown, are making demand projections uncertain. Against this backdrop, analysts suggest investors stay selective and pick stocks of companies with stronger brand recall, expanding distribution network, diversified product profile, healthier balance sheet, and sustainable cash flow. "The government's various proposals under Budget 2023-24 (FY24) may lead to the building material segment growing between 8 per cent and 12 per cent for the next five years.
A young couple sharing a laugh - in the living room over a Polish joke book, on the beach, in the rain - with the tagline, "Made for each other", hung from billboards at prominent street corners from the 1960s to the 1990s. It was a campaign for one of the largest selling cigarette brands in India, Wills (Navy Cut) from the ITC stable, that resonated with a generation of smokers and non-smokers alike till the curtains came down on tobacco advertising in 2004. As we prepare to welcome 2024, ITC has metamorphosed from a tobacco giant into a conglomerate straddling multiple large-sized businesses. In the mind space of Gen Z or millennials, the company represents a gamut of branded products - from frozen food (ITC Master Chef), noodles (YiPPee!), and cookies (Sunfeast) to snacks (Bingo!) and notebooks (Classmate), and so on and so forth.
Kolkata trams -- now in their 150th year -- are the last to survive modernity in Indian cities, writes Ishita Ayan Dutt.
'If you want it to grow well and serve the true needs of the economy, it needs a lot of freedom and flexibility, which comes in terms of the reform objective set by the regulator.'
In similarly-worded notices of attachment dated October 17, Sebi asked 11 banks, including ICICI Bank, Bank of Baroda, HDFC Bank, IDBI Bank, Indian Overseas Bank and Standard Chartered Bank, to attach the accounts of the three individuals.
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