Software giant Wipro's Azim Premji donated Rs 9,713 crore or Rs 27 crore a day to retain his top rank among Indian philanthropists in FY21. Premji, the founder chairman of the company, increased his donation by nearly a fourth during the pandemic year, as per the Edelgive Hurun India Philanthropy List 2021, which had HCL's Shiv Nadar at second place with contributions of Rs 1,263 crore towards upliftment causes. Mukesh Ambani of Reliance Industries, India's richest man, came third on the list with a Rs 577 crore contribution and was succeeded by Kumar Mangalam Birla with Rs 377 crore.
Manufacturing companies have been outperformers on the bourses in the current year, leading to a rise in their weighting in the benchmark index. Companies in sectors such as FMCG, automobile, pharmaceuticals, metals, cement, and agrochemicals now account for 25.43 per cent of the Nifty 50 index, up 88 basis points from 24.55 per cent at the end of December last year and a record low of 23.1 per cent at the end of CY20. The manufacturing sector is now dominated by FMCG majors such as Hindustan Unilever, ITC, Asian Paints, Nestle, and Britannia, accounting for 45 per cent of the combined market cap of all manufacturing companies in the index.
There were certainly qualities adhering to the Tata Group, which emanated from the persona of Ratan Tata. Most notable of these would be the low profile he maintained, which sharply contrasted the in-your-face celebrity status, celebration of wealth and pursuit of importance many of liberalised India's rich, love, notes Shyam G Menon.
In a curious move, Reliance Industries' (RIL) executive director and Mukesh Ambani's trusted aide PMS Prasad pledged 600,000 shares of the company last month, which is 93.75 per cent of the total shares he owns in RIL. Prasad owned a total of 640,000 RIL shares and his compensation stood at Rs 11.15 crore in FY20.
In August, the Reserve Bank of India Governor Shaktikanta Das held a meeting with chief executive officers/ managing directors (CEOs/ MDs) of large non-banking financial corporations (NBFCs). The discussions included diversifying borrowing sources for NBFCs and housing finance companies (HFCs) to contain increasing reliance on bank borrowing, risks associated with high credit growth in retail segment in unsecured loans, prioritising IT upgrades and cyber-security, improving provisioning, monitoring of stressed exposures and slippages, ensuring robust liquidity and asset-liability management, ensuring transparency in pricing, creating robust grievance redress mechanisms.
Billionaire Mukesh Ambani on Monday pressed for bridging the digital divide "both among nations and within nations", saying connectivity and communications have become the fundamental rights of every person. Also, there is a need to bring back the economies around the globe. Speaking at the Qatar Economic Forum, he said it is difficult to imagine what India would have been without the 4G telecom network during the pandemic. "The digital divide must be bridged, both among nations and within nations.
They are making switch to the high-growth alternative investments fund industry, reports Pavan Burugula.
Power generating companies (gencos) that use imported coal to produce electricity, may find it difficult to switch on their idle units immediately in the wake of high fuel costs, several players have told Business Standard. Recently, the Union power ministry had invoked Section 11 of the Electricity Act mandating all imported coal-based plants to generate power at full capacity. However, some generating companies that use imported coal, argue that it is simply unviable for them to produce power when the price of coal in the international market is high, while the per-unit price of power has been capped at Rs 12 per unit on the domestic power exchange.
Government had proposed a revised investment plan for the main gas fields in the KG-D6 block.
Jeff Bezos of Amazon tops the list for the second consecutive year with networth of $147 billion.
Mukesh's television unit has been aggressively wrapping up deals with hundreds of small players in a street-by-street effort to conquer that final hurdle in its cable TV drive
Telecom operators, including Reliance Jio, have been demanding "same service same rules" regime which means that mobile applications providing calls and messaging services should also be made to comply with set of rules that are mandatory for mobile service providers.
The merged entity will become the third biggest refiner behind IOC and Reliance Industries.
Issues related with intellectual property rights, including piracy of films and software, figured prominently during the India-US CEO Forum in New Delhi attended by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and US President Barack Obama.
Thanks to a $5.7 billion deal with Facebook, a Rs 53,125 crore rights issue and more stake sale to companies such as Saudi Aramco, the target is likely to be achieved by December.
Combined profit before tax of 81 firms down 37.5% y-o-y, worst show in at least 3 years.
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.
Richest Indian Gautam Adani's ports-to-power-to-cement conglomerate is "deeply overleveraged" with the group predominantly using debt to invest aggressively across existing as well as new businesses, CreditSights, a Fitch Group unit, said on Tuesday. In a report titled 'Adani Group: Deeply Overleveraged', CreditSights said, "In the worst-case scenario, overly ambitious debt-funded growth plans could eventually spiral into a massive debt trap, and possibly culminate into a distressed situation or default of one or more group companies." Starting out as a commodities trader in the late 1980s, the Adani group has diversified from mines, ports and power plants into airports, data centers and defence.
The possible acquisition of Holcim India business will be one of the biggest inbound corporate deals in the country. Currently, Walmart Inc.'s $16-billion acquisition of Flipkart Online Services in 2018 remains the biggest acquisition of an Indian asset by any acquirer, followed by BP plc acquisition of 30 per cent stake in Reliance Industries' 23 oil and gas production blocks in 2011 for $7.2 billion. Bloomberg reported late on Wednesday night that Holcim - the world's biggest cement maker - is considering a potential sale of its India business and gauging interest in its controlling stake in Ambuja Cement.
'To sustain our growth trajectory, we must continue to explore and capitalise on growth opportunities.'
Quite a few large- and mid-cap stocks are yet to recover from the note ban, pharma, banking and rural demand-based industries among laggards.
Reliance Jio and Facebook will look to use WhatsApp for delivering goods from local neighbourhood kirana stores to consumers before expanding collaboration in education and healthcare sector, billionaire Mukesh Ambani said soon after announcing the mega Rs 43,574 -crore deal. "All of us at Reliance and Jio are delighted to welcome Facebook Inc," he said in a short video message posted on the group's social media handles.
The combined market-cap of all listed Adani group firms has plunged nearly Rs 7.11 trillion since January 24 when the Hindenburg report was made public.
When Vineet Mittal first got into solar power, sometime around 2009, and was planting solar panels in Gujarat, renewable energy looked like a sector ripe for startups. Renewables were clearly the future of energy, and the big boys - Mukesh Ambani's Reliance, Adani Group, and the Tatas - were focusing much more on coal and petroleum. Little did Mittal know that things were going to change drastically.
The rights issue price has been set at Rs 1,257 a share, a discount of nearly 14 per cent to the last closing price of Rs 1,459. The company had set May 14 as the record date for the rights issue, which meant shareholders as on that day would be eligible to apply. Shareholders will be able to apply for one share for every 15 shares held.
The deal, as well as some other strategic and financial investments in works, will help Ambani cut debt at RIL.
Clearly, he is in the right place, at the right time.
The fixed line broadband will offer "ultra high-definition entertainment on large screen TVs, multi-party video conferencing from your living room, voice-activated virtual assistants, virtual reality gaming, digital shopping, immersive experiences," Ambani said.
Corporate India continues to be generous in rewarding its shareholders with big dividend payouts. This is especially true for shareholders of companies such as Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Hindustan Zinc (HZL), and Coal India (CIL) which are seen as cash cows of large business groups and the government. Boosted by a big payout by these three companies, the combined equity dividend payout by listed companies was up 38 per cent year-on-year (YoY) to a record high of Rs 2.27 trillion in 2022-23 (FY23), compared with Rs 1.65 trillion in 2021-22 (FY22).
HDFC Life, which posted a consolidated net profit of Rs 281.83 crore (Rs 2.81 billion) for the quarter ended June compared with Rs 11.92 crore (Rs 119.2 million) in corresponding period last year (according to HDFC's first quarter results), has diversified its distribution mix.
Mutual funds (MFs) are set to be net sellers of Indian equities for the first time in the past seven financial years, having sold stocks worth about Rs 1.27 trillion so far in 2020-21 (FY21), making it the highest net sales on record in a financial year. MFs had been net buyers in the previous six financial years, including purchases of over Rs 1.41 trillion in FY18, Rs 88,152 crore in FY19, and Rs 91,814 crore in FY20. The last time they offloaded Indian equities was in FY14, when they net sold stocks worth Rs 21,159 crore. In contrast, foreign portfolio investors (FPIs) have ramped up buying in FY21, purchasing more than Rs 2.6 trillion worth of shares.
Bharti Airtel on Tuesday announced that it has scrapped the minimum recharge plan of Rs 99 in seven circles -- Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka, Northeast, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh (West). In these circles, the price of the entry-level plan now would be Rs 155. This 57 per cent increase in Airtel's entry-level plan comes two months after the telco discontinued the Rs 99 plan in Haryana and Odisha in November last year.
Most listed corporate entities in the country are in a fix. With the sudden declaration in late March of a nationwide lockdown to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic, the final calculations of their financial results for the year 2019-20 (FY20) are hanging in limbo. Till April 19, only 41 of the 3,947 companies listed on the BSE have managed to finalise the dates for the declaration of their yearly financial results.
The 20 richest people on the planet are worth a staggering USD 1.2 trillion, a sum roughly equivalent to the annual economic output of Mexico.
However, RIL's total outgo towards remuneration to its all top management personnel, as also the sitting fees and commissions for its non-executive directors, increased during the fiscal year ended March 31, 2012.
Forty Indians entered the billionaires' club in the pandemic-stricken 2020 to take the number of those in the coveted list to 177 people, a report said on Tuesday. Mukesh Ambani continued to be the wealthiest Indian with a networth of $83 billion. The head of Reliance Industries witnessed a 24 per cent jump in fortunes and climbed up one spot to be the eighth richest globally, as per the Hurun Global Rich List. Gautam Adani from Gujarat, who has had a spectacular rise in fortunes in the last few years, saw his wealth almost doubling to $32 billion in 2020 and climbed 20 places to be the 48th richest person globally and the second wealthiest Indian.
Jio's global partnerships took shape this year when Jio Platforms, a 100 per cent subsidiary of Reliance Jio which has invested in various digital platforms, was able to woo a bevy of marquee investors: Facebook, Google, Qualcomm, Intel, and a numerous PE funds.
The four women have a collective wealth of $11.3 billion and account for a little more than three per cent of the total net worth of all on the coveted list whose collective wealth amount to $346 billion.
In spite of the high number of exits, Reliance group firms of both brothers continue to be darlings of small investors
India Inc reacted cautiously to allegations on Swiss a/cs.
