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.
In the shadows of a sliding rupee, India's knitwear hub Tiruppur is weaving a success story. While the domestic currency edges closer to the 86 mark against the US dollar, triggering concerns for many sectors, this textile town in Tamil Nadu is finding opportunity in adversity: Between April and December alone, Tiruppur's exports reached Rs 26,000 crore, almost eclipsing last financial year's total of Rs 30,690 crore.
Reliance Retail has entered the Indian fast-moving consumer goods space as it takes its private label brands, sold at its supermarkets and hypermarkets, Reliance Fresh and Reliance Smart, to general trade. The company had internally set a target of Rs 50,000 crore turnover from the FMCG business, which will fall under Reliance Retail's consumer brand division. Business Standard accessed a presentation which includes the brands it has taken to the general trade.
The deportation of Indians from the United States, deaths in the Maha Kumbh stampede and the joint Parliamentary committee report on the Waqf bill were among the issues that led to heated exchanges and some disruptions in an otherwise smooth first part of the Budget session that ended on Thursday.
The 550,000 unorganised drug traders in the country are readying to take on the entry of corporate houses like Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group
In the months immediately following the 2024 tragedy, reporting on the landslide per se had been a straightforward affair. On one side was death and destruction. On the other side, survivors and the business of survival. It was black and white. What direction to take was clear. Rehabilitation in comparison, felt like a complex situation. One that is fraught with shades of grey. As grey as human life, explains Shyam G Menon.
Punjab and Gujarat are in favour of FDI in multi-brand retail in food items while many others have vehemently opposed the idea, a government official said.
India's financial sector is dominated by large government-owned and private-sector banks.
A day after his appointment as the 26th governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), outgoing Revenue Secretary Sanjay Malhotra on Tuesday said one must understand the economic landscape and do what was best for the economy. "Let me first go, join, understand the turf ... Here it is a different role," Malhotra said, speaking to reporters in front of North Block.
Another trend: A preference for coloured diamonds among brides, who are pairing them with their groom's birthstone. So, along with yellow or white diamonds, they are choosing pink, green, blue sapphires, emeralds or red rubies.
The Aditya Birla Group, which rolled out its retail chain More recently, is studying the possibilities of creating linkages between its corporate social responsibility projects in the farm sector with the retail business of sourcing farm produce.
The Adani family, led by Chairman Gautam Adani, is the most valued first-generation family business at Rs 15.44 trillion.
According to the decision, such entities can now first operate through e-commerce and then open brick-and-mortar stores.
'We started affordable housing loans that has good traction and the books have grown to Rs 750 crore as of the end of last quarter.'
Food delivery app Swiggy on Wednesday launched a Rs 11,330-crore initial share sale, asking investors to take a pie of Indian middle class' rising propensity of online ordering. The company, which is present in over 650 cities and towns of the country, is launching the initial public offering (IPO) amid heightened concerns on urban demand slump, and the management stressed that it is unaffected by the broader trends in the economy. "We are also reading about it, but we are not seeing that yet in the business... So far, we have not seen the impact of demand on our business," its chief financial officer Rahul Bothra said.
In India, it is not easy to fight it out with the large banks which are nimble-footed and technology-savvy and are continuously innovating on the retail turf with newer products for customer acquisition.
Indian businesses' weak ability to compete overseas says much about the infirmities imposed by the intensity of government dominance of economic policy and the nature of this dominance, observes Kanika Datta.
Manish Tiwary plans to take up a new role at another firm.
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.
India's retail business, the second largest employer after agriculture, is estimated to touch $590 billion in two years, Parliament was informed on Monday.
Swedish furnishing major IKEA, part of the Ingka Group, is inviting its investment arm - Ingka Investments - to India, a senior company executive said during an interaction in New Delhi. The move suggests that the group is looking at India as a priority market. The areas of investments being considered by Ingka Investments could range from taking stake in companies across sectors such as renewables, recycling, real estate, and software which synergise with IKEA's broader retail requirements.
Billionaire Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries Ltd on Friday reported a 22.5 per cent rise in net profit for the quarter ended March on the back of bumper oil refining margins, steady growth in telecom and digital services and strong momentum in the retail business. The oil-to-retail-to-telecom conglomerate's consolidated net profit rose to Rs 16,203 crore in the quarter ended March 31, 2022 from Rs 13,227 crore, the firm said in a statement. Net profit, however, fell 12.6 per cent sequentially -- breaking a six-quarter chain of quarter-on-quarter improvement.
These 10 stocks represent the best mix of value and growth, offering relatively low price-to-earnings and price-to-book ratios, a high return on equity, and sufficiently high potential from current levels.
In view of the rising number of mobile and internet banking users, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has proposed to tighten norms related to the liquidity coverage ratio (LCR) by increasing the run-off factor for retail deposits. "Banking has undergone rapid transformation in recent years. "While increased usage of technology has facilitated the ability to make instantaneous bank transfers and withdrawals, it has also led to a concomitant increase in risks, requiring proactive management," the RBI said in the draft guidelines released on Thursday.
Defying the bearish sentiment in the markets on Monday, ICICI Bank's share price rose by 2 per cent, reaching an intraday high of Rs 1,234.4 per share on the BSE. With a 1.5 per cent gain at the close, the stock emerged as the top performer on both the BSE Sensex and the National Stock Exchange Nifty 50 indices.
A non-strategic investor like Poonawalla brings in not only capital but also creative freedom. Indian cinema needs more investors like him, reports Vanita Kohli Khandekar.
Retailers want rental waivers should be extended for a few more months, since business is not expected to pick up before the Dussehra-Diwali period, which falls in October-November.
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About 50,000 to 100,000 people - representing associations of farmers, traders, hawkers, and even chemists from all over India - will converge on Mumbai's Azad Maidan to demand that big corporations quit the retail business.
200 hypermarket and large format stores by 2010.
Perhaps, the group's leadership position and potential in the retail segment prompted Tata Sons Chairman Cyrus Mistry to identify retail as one of the group's four growth clusters in his recent Vision 2025 statement.
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.
Russia's state-owned oil firm Rosneft has agreed to supply up to 500,000 barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil to Indian upstream oil and gas major Reliance Industries (RIL) in the largest-ever energy deal between the two countries, Reuters reported on Thursday. The 10-year agreement amounts to 0.5 per cent of global oil supply and is valued at roughly $13 billion per year at current prices, it said.
'If through growth and serving the customer we become number one, we will be very happy and very proud.'
"We will raise Rs 300 crore via bonds of two-, three- and five-year tenures. This will be our maiden bond issuance and is part of our effort to widen funding sources," says Vimal Bhandari, executive vice-chairman and chief executive officer (CEO), Arka Fincap. The firm, a subsidiary of Kirloskar Oil, is only five years old and small (assets of around Rs 5,000 crore with an "AA" rating), but the response to this float will be closely watched: It would be the first by a non-banking finance company (NBFC) after Mint Road upped the risk weights on bank exposures to them by 25 percentage points. The move by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has caught NBFCs off guard even though the issue had been flagged by Governor Shaktikanta Das with their corner-room occupants (and that of banks) in July and August 2023 - on consumer credit and the dependency on bank borrowings.
Embattled retailer Future Retail Ltd (FRL) on Tuesday moved the Supreme Court to avert insolvency proceedings over missing a loan repayment deadline, even as its independent directors rejected an Amazon-supported offer to sell the company businesses at less than a third of what Mukesh Ambani's Reliance is offering. India's second-largest retailer, which operates multi-brand retail chains such as Big Bazaar, Easyday and Heritage, failed to pay Rs 3,494.56 crore to lenders by the due date of December-end and sought a 30-day grace period to resolve the situation. Unable to find money, it moved the apex court seeking to restrain its lenders from declaring the company a defaulter, which can invite initiation of insolvency proceedings.