Fintech players are customising solutions for rural markets and helping SMEs learn how to use the services
Tucked away at a lane in Arehalli Guddadahalli, a small village in Bengaluru Rural district is a nondescript factory of LaundryMate, one of India's first organised technology-led online laundry services firms. The company has built the country's largest laundry facility, which is spread across 53,000 square feet - the size of a football field. Inside the hangar-like building, one can hear the whooshing and humming sound of big hi-tech washing machines being operated by the newly-recruited staff of LaundryMate.
Future Group founder and CEO Kishore Biyani on Tuesday said Amazon was fully aware of his group's talks with Reliance Industries for the sale of retail assets that followed the US giant offering no concrete help to tide over the cash crisis. Opening up after being locked in an intense legal battle with Amazon over the Rs 24,713 crore deal with Reliance, Biyani in an interview with PTI said the US giant's 2019 investment in Future Coupons Pvt Ltd (FCPL) -- Future Retail's parent -- was for coupon and gifting business only and the same could continue post-retail assets going to Reliance. He hoped to complete the deal with Reliance within two months of Sebi approval.
The bill to nullify retrospective taxation offers a fair solution within the framework of Indian law and Parliamentary sovereignty to companies which have been subjected to such demands, Finance Secretary T V Somanathan said on Thursday. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman introduced 'The Taxation Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2021' in the Lok Sabha that seeks to withdraw tax demands made using a 2012 retrospective legislation to tax the indirect transfer of Indian assets. The Bill provides for the withdrawal of tax demand made on "indirect transfer of Indian assets if the transaction was undertaken before May 28, 2012 (i.e. the day the retrospective tax legislation came into being)."
'I am most excited about a new video production solution for large organisations -- think Fortune 500 companies -- that have distributed teams, many of which are based in India.'
Mumbai-based Indian Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (ISMC) and Singapore-headquartered IGSS Ventures have one strategy in common: They have told the government in their application for semiconductor fabrication plants that they will export the bulk of the chips they make in India in the initial five or 10 years. The third applicant, Vedanta-Foxconn, which is also building a fab plant, has said it will concentrate on the needs of consumer electronics and mobile device markets, and earmark 80 per cent of output for domestic consumption, but has not specified its customers. Finding a viable domestic market could well be the biggest challenge for India's renewed tryst with semiconductors. Fab plants do not sell directly to end users but to intermediary chip design companies - such as Qualcomm or MediaTek.
Businesses across the world consider efficient delivery of shipments to be a growth driver, and IoT-based start-up Roambee fills this need with real-time reports to businesses using tracking data.
Moms don't have the luxury of time. When a problem presents itself, we have to think on our feet and come up with a viable solution.
The comedy is stale, but there are bits that make you laugh, notes Divya Nair.
The partners intend to invest $2 million annually through the India Innovation Growth Programme for the entrepreneurs to develop technology-based solutions for the betterment of the society
This makes it the most valued fintech company in the country after Paytm and Walmart-owned PhonePe.
Hydrography (underwater geography) prevents the Indian Navy for opting for an all-conventional, or all-nuclear submarine fleet.
With an epic battle of billionaires for supremacy in one of the world's most prolific markets and a pandemic-propelled surge in online shopping in the background, India's nearly trillion-dollar retail market is hoping to touch 85 per cent of the pre-COVID business in the first half of the New Year. In a year when the COVID-19 carnage ripped apart the retail business, circa 2020 will best go down for the unravelling of the war between Jeff Bezos, the world's wealthiest man, and richest Indian Mukesh Ambani for pre-eminence in the booming market that is estimated to reach $1.3 trillion by 2025. It all started with Ambani's Reliance Industries agreeing in August to buy assets of the nation's second-largest retailer for Rs 24,713 crore, just a year after Bezos' Amazon purchased an indirect stake in the indebted Future Retail.
The action group will be known as Parliamentarians with Innovators for India (PIIndia.org), which aims to spur innovators to solve challenges in areas such as public health, economy, and livelihood. While the 14 parliamentarians come from different states and across party lines, the group has organisations like Population Foundation of India, Centre for Policy Research, Omnicuris, apart from top experts in public health and policy.
Among the options being weighed are discounts on existing rentals, short-term deferrals, and 50 per cent waivers.
Visa delays have perturbed Indian visitors this summer. But a solution could be in sight soon, as embassies gear up to address the challenges caused by a spike in applications and staff shortages. While the British High Commission has said it is working urgently to reduce the current visa processing time, the German Embassy has introduced extra shifts to process more visas. However, appointments with the latter are fully booked till August-end due to high volumes.
In order to determine whether this would be sound strategy for them, one needs to look at two issues: One, on the alliances being built globally between telcos, on one hand, and cloud service firms, on the other, especially with the advent of 5G; and two, how their business strategies in India will blend into with such a deal.
India cannot ignore the neglect of climate finance by the developed nations, Modi asserted at G20 session
The 4G service may use Reliance Retail, with a surging customer base, as the launch pad
Simplilearn said the pandemic had accelerated demand for skills in areas such as artificial intelligence, cloud computing, data science and cybersecurity.
Though the US has got together a number of vetted and potential Indian business partners, most of these companies say they haven't had much luck in stitching up deals to tap into India as an export market for their goods.
More than three weeks have passed since the Reserve Bank of India's (RBI's) new guidelines on e-mandates for recurring payments came into effect but consumers are still taking to social media platforms to complain about the disruptions they are facing. This comes as most stakeholders in the ecosystem have not put in place systems in accordance with the new rules, resulting in many transactions not going through. Industry sources said most banks are still not ready, especially the smaller ones.
WhatsApp on Wednesday said it expects to facilitate the purchase of "affordable sachet-sized" health insurance through its platform by the end of the year as part of its efforts to provide users in India with greater access to financial solutions. The Facebook-owned company noted that its 'Payments' feature is now available to users across the country (currently up to 20 million users) with support from banking partners - State Bank of India, HDFC, ICICI and Axis Bank.
Indian IT services firm Infosys and Rolls-Royce, an aerospace and defence technology major, on Wednesday announced signing a strategic partnership for sourcing engineering and R&D Services for the latter's Civil Aerospace business. As part of the overall partnership, Rolls-Royce will "transition a significant part of its engineering centre capabilities for civil aerospace in Bengaluru to Infosys", a statement said. However, the number of people who will move to Infosys was not disclosed.
The applications range from disaster recovery to predicting demand and understanding customer choices using artificial intelligence.
India doesn't have a data protection law or a dedicated law on cybersecurity. Also, there is no specialised law on privacy. Experts say this complicates the scenario for businesses as they continue to be liable for breach in client data even when employees work out of the home.
Trifacta's investors include Accel, Greylock Partners, Ignition and Cathay Innovation
IT services major Infosys on Wednesday announced a new programme, wherein it will offer 500 job seekers the opportunity to complete a fully digital, online diploma course certified by Salesforce. The programme aims to prepare Americans for 21st century careers in the technology sector. Leveraging Trailhead, Salesforce's free online learning platform, the program will train these 500 American workers, free of cost, for roles at Infosys as Salesforce Certified Administrators and Salesforce Industries Developers, a statement said. The programme, targeting recent graduates from major universities, liberal arts colleges, and community colleges, will help Infosys to create a workforce prepared for the future, it added.
Mukesh Ambani is stringing in new partnerships within the Reliance ecosystem with the best in global business -- from Facebook, Google and Microsoft to umpteen sovereign wealth funds and a soon-to-be-declared strategic partner in a big global retailer, notes Shailesh Dobhal.
'Financial independence will help unlock the full potential of these businesses.'
'We need to see more Indian Americans and people of colour hold elected office and serve in executive roles.'
For now, the concerns over bad loans have taken a back seat; a bigger challenge for the banking community is credit growth, explains Tamal Bandyopadhyay.
India conceding ground to bring only top 100 digital companies like Google, Facebook, and Netflix into the global taxation pact may have revenue implications. This will mean that New Delhi will have to withdraw the contentious 2 per cent equalisation levy on e-commerce operators by 2023. This may have revenue implications for India, experts pointed out, as the equalisation levy has a much lower annual revenue threshold of Rs 2 crore (euro 0.2 million) as against euro 20 billion agreed by 130 countries at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). India, along with other developing countries, was pitching for at least euro 1 billion threshold to cover at least 5,000 global entities. India collected Rs 2,057 crore from the equalisation levy in 2020-21, an 85 per cent growth over Rs 1,136 crore in the previous fiscal.
While there was a sharp drop in footfalls in malls in H1FY21, there was reasonable recovery in H2. However, the second wave derailed the recovery.
The job placement rate for students trained by NIIT in China is over 90 per cent.' A revealing excerpt from Saibal Dasgupta's Running With The Dragon: How India Should Do Business With China.
Reliance is leveraging the technological change of building a virtualised 5G network which would see the current hardware-dependent networks shift to software-centric platforms.
The Year of the Rabbit, according to the Chinese calendar, began on Sunday, January 22.
bp had last year bought 49 per cent stake in the 1,400-odd petrol pumps and 31 aviation turbine fuel stations owned by RIL for $1 billion.
A certain type of TGV, called V150, holds the world record for the highest speed on any national rail system. This record has been in place since April 2007.
'We're seeing major Bollywood celebrities, fashion icons, and even movie studios all wanting to build Metaverse experiences'