Excise duties on mobile phones to be 1% without CENVAT credit or 6% with CENVAT credit. This provision will have marginal impact on telcos.
'Whoever owns the best chip industry will be the Saudi Arabia of the era of data,' predicts Rajeev Srinivasan.
'The pipeline of new industrial projects is the best I've seen in the last 10 years, and it looks solid enough to sustain for at least a few quarters,' points out Naushad Forbes, adding, 'It is only when we get back to the same labour force participation we saw before Covid that the economy will have truly recovered.'
After reports of contamination in cough syrups sent from the country, India is considering a system to test them before exporting. It is learnt that the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO) has sent a proposal to the Union health ministry on this. The idea is to test the medicines at government labs before exporting.
The Tata group's tryst with mobile services, with either CDMA or GSM technology, did not really fly, forcing it to close operations and write off losses. Now the group is back in the big game, this time straddling the telecom equipment, network and technology space in India as well as the global market. To this end, it is leveraging the opportunities that flow from 5G technology through open radio access network, or O-RAN. Recently, the Tata Sons' subsidiary Panatone Finvest acquired 43.3 per cent in Bengaluru-based telecom equipment manufacturer Tejas Network for Rs 1,850 crore and announced it would buy another 26 per cent of the voting capital through an open offer.
While most experts suggest the government loosen its purse strings and not worry about the fiscal deficit in a pandemic impacted year, it will be a tightrope walk for the government to increase spending without going overboard.
WhatsApp has drawn massive criticism from users globally, including India over concerns that data was being shared with its parent company, Facebook. WhatsApp, on its part, has maintained that messages on the platform are end-to-end encrypted and that neither WhatsApp nor Facebook can see the private messages on WhatsApp's platform.
The auction for the 5G spectrum is likely to take place around April-May next year, Communications Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said on Thursday. While relief measures announced in September this year for telecom operators marked the first set of reforms, the government will bring out a series of further reforms and "telecom regulatory structure should change in coming 2-3 years", Vaishnaw said. Speaking at the 'Times Now Summit 2021', the minister said India's telecom sector regulation has to be benchmarked with the global best, and added that "so, we will come with a series of reforms in this, such that the global benchmark of regulations is achieved in India".
It came as a surprise to all stakeholders - competing telecom companies (telcos), most analysts and even the government's internal projections on revenues from the 5G auctions. Reliance Jio disrupted all calculations by paying a stiff Rs 40,000 crore to buy 10 MHz of spectrum in the 700-MHz band, globally considered a key band for efficient 5G service coverage, along with the default 3.5 GHz band and the ultra-high speed and low-latency millimetre band of 26 GHz band. So what made Jio pay almost 45 per cent of its total spend in this auction for the 700 MHz band - much more than what it rustled up even for the 3.5 GHz band?
'Quality of management, corporate governance, allocation of capital, full disclosures should form the basis to decide investing in a particular stock.'
Want last year's bonus? Sell our tickets: Jet Airways tells travel agents.
With its new line-up, the firm has managed to touch the right chords, but to regain market share from the established players, Micromax will have to fight a protracted battle.
Apple Inc's leading contract manufacturer, Taiwanese giant Wistron, has exceeded its investment obligation in India in just eight months, although the government's production-linked investment (PLI) scheme allowed it to complete the investment in four years. Between August 2020 and end March 2021, Wistron made an investment of Rs 1255 crore - 25 per cent more than the total investment it had committed to the government. Under the PLI scheme for mobile devices, the government had stipulated that each of the five participating global companies needed to invest Rs 250 crore every year for the first four years, totalling Rs 1,000 crore.
'It is going to be extremely rapid and anybody who is not there, be it investor, manufacturer, supplier, will miss out.'
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 fundamental debate remains where you stand on the long-term growth question. That is what every investor must monitor and come to their own conclusions, suggests Akash Prakash.
Policy lays out a 5-year road map seeking creation of 3.5 mn jobs and promoting 10,000 start-ups.
At least two of them - Lava and Micromax - are arming themselves against the Chinese rivals which made them insignificant in the local market over the past few years.
'You have to be a total anti-national bozo to shut down the Nokia plant in Sriperumbudur, which was the first large manufacturing plant for mobile phones in India.' 'Why was the unit shut down? Because of somebody's ego.'
'The focus needs to shift towards the ability to collect payments, particularly in tier-3 to tier-4 areas where acceptance is still lacking.'
The central government is on track to meet its fiscal deficit target of 6.4 per cent of the GDP for 2022-23 on the back of strong growth in revenue collections, the World Bank said in its India Development Update on Tuesday. High nominal GDP growth in the first quarter supported strong growth in revenue collection, especially Goods and Services Tax (GST), despite tax cuts on fuel. Notwithstanding an increase in spending due to expanded fertilizer subsidies and food subsidies for vulnerable households in response to the commodity price shock, the government is on track to meet its FY22/23 fiscal deficit target of 6.4 per cent of GDP and the general government deficit is projected to decline to 9.6 per cent from 10.3 per cent in FY21/22 and 13.3 per cent in FY20/21.
'Welfare schemes are not a necessary evil, they are a necessary good.'
'In the short term, we may see some disruptions due to Covid, but in the medium-to-long term, we should keep an eye on US inflation and 10-year bond yields.'
Jiomart B2B is the latest among organised supply-chain companies to bite the bullet, shutting down its warehouses, and asking its employees to leave. Why are companies finding it difficult to sustain the supply-chain business? Experts point out that gross margins in supplying fast-moving consumer goods (FMCGs) are very low.
Expect a more modest out-turn of around 5 per cent (if not less) because of the longer-term scarring effects of the Covid shock, the sharply slowing growth in the pre-Covid years and some scepticism about the growth-efficacy of some of recent official policy initiatives, explains Shankar Acharya, former chief economic advisor to the government.
They will not be followed by analysts and no fund manager can buy such small companies with low trading liquidity.
Large companies, those that are talked about in the media and tracked on social media, have already been discovered. They won't lead to extraordinary gains, Debashish Basu points out.
Fitch Ratings on Thursday said the resurgence of COVID-19 infections may delay India's economic recovery, but won't derail it, as it kept the sovereign rating unchanged at 'BBB-' with a negative outlook. It projected a 12.8 per cent recovery in GDP in the fiscal year ending March 2022 (FY22), moderating to 5.8 per cent in FY23, from an estimated contraction of 7.5 per cent in 2020-21. Fitch had in June last year revised outlook for India to 'negative' from 'stable' on grounds that the coronavirus pandemic had significantly weakened the country's growth outlook and exposed the challenges associated with a high public debt burden.
Experts say while the increasing demand for a ban on Chinese goods might make for good optics, the reality is that India is still heavily dependent on that country in a wide range of industries like electronics, mobile devices, auto, pharma, telecom equipment, and fertilisers.
Market participants are hoping for a few tweaks on the taxation front which will encourage consumers and businesses to spend.
The BSE Midcap and the Small-cap Index have run up 25.3 per cent and 31.3 per cent respectively over the past year. Valuations are no longer cheap, notes Sanjay Kumar Singh.
'Unemployment barely figures in the Budget except as a derived demand from the industry and infrastructure.' 'There is no effort at direct attack on unemployment.'
Not only has the Mudra loan mela generated no jobs, it has frittered away trillions of taxpayers' money and it's time to bury the scheme, argues Debashis Basu.
Casual labour, which is the type of employment provided by agriculture, yields much lower wages -- of the order of Rs 291 per day. Labour would not voluntarily shift to this lowest wage-rate sector unless it had no better option, observes Mahesh Vyas.
Buy from an established agent rather than a novice who may not be around when you need his assistance.
In his first poll rally for the April 6 assembly polls, Modi rooted for the Tamil language, culture and invoked the welfare legacies of M G Ramachandran and J Jayalalithaa, late chief ministers and All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam icons.
Here's what could be ahead for India: A $10-trillion economy by 2030-32, a Sensex at 1,00,000 by 2025, monthly GST revenues at Rs 2 trillion by 2024-25, 100 new unicorns by 2025, and poverty below 5 per cent by 2030, predicts R Jagannathan.
To help revive the economy battered by COVID-19, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Monday announced a slew of measures, including Rs 1.1 lakh crore credit guarantee scheme for improving health infrastructure, and enhancing the limit under the ECLGS by 50 per cent to Rs 4.5 lakh crore for the MSME sector facing liquidity crunch. Sharing the details of stimulus package, the finance minister said this comprises eight relief measures and other eight measures to support the economic growth. She announced Rs 1.1 lakh crore loan guarantee scheme for COVID-affected sectors, including health sector, which includes guarantee cover for expansion or for new projects. Besides, she said, additional Rs 1.5 lakh crore limit enhancement done for Emergency Credit Line Guarantee Scheme (ECLGS) scheme.
'One out of three phones sold in India is a Xiaomi phone.'
Why are investors gung-ho about State Bank? asks Tamal Bandyopadhyay.
...but are we chasing yesterday's dreams, asks Ajit Balakrishnan.
