'India will soon have the world's largest and youngest population -- just imagine what tomorrow's citizens of India will be able to accomplish, given the right education, training, and opportunity.'
In the midst of rising global concern over China's military expansionism, India and three other member nations of the Quad on Thursday vowed to uphold a rules-based international order underpinned by respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty, freedom of navigation and peaceful resolution of disputes.
The armed forces have roped in Battlefield Nursing Assistants (BFNA) to help fight the second wave of COVID-19 and have suggested that a similar model can be followed by state governments and hospitals, according to senior officials.
At Prestige Polygon Towers in Chennai's Teynampet, hectic preparations are on for a mega global investors' meet under the aegis of Guidance Tamil Nadu (the state investment promotion agency) scheduled for January 2024. Asked about the key focus areas of the meet, the agency's managing director and chief executive officer, V Vishnu, said the state was betting big on electric mobility. This is no surprise, given that the state has signed electric vehicle (EV)-related memorandums of understanding (MoUs) with several companies in the recent past that may bring in investments worth around Rs 33,000 crore with the potential to create over 43,000 job opportunities.
Billionaire Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries has signed a pact to invest an undisclosed amount in a giant petrochemical hub being built in the UAE. The oil-to-telecom conglomerate will join the recently-formed Ta'ziz joint venture of Abu Dhabi state energy giant Adnoc and state holding company ADQ for developing the Ruwais Derivatives Park in western Abu Dhabi. A company statement said an agreement has been signed for Reliance to invest in the project but did not give details. Unconfirmed reports put the investment at about $1.5 billion.
The online pharmacy market, which was worth about $512 million in 2018, is growing at a CAGR of 63 per cent and is expected to hit overall revenues of over $3.6 billion by 2022.
A hotel in 1975, entry into paperboards in 1979, India's dominant cigarette maker, ITC, read the tea - or tobacco - leaves early, leveraged its enterprise strengths and stepped up the diversification agenda to create multiple drivers of growth. Some failed, some faltered, some were transformational, adding steadily to the top line. Now those efforts are making a difference: margins from non-cigarettes - FMCG, hotels, agri, paperboards, paper and packaging - are expanding and profits are kicking in more significantly than ever before.
Here's the full text of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's address to a joint session of the United States Congress, delivered on Thursday.
Essar group on Friday announced the signing of a USD 2.4 billion (Rs 19,000 crore) deal to sell certain ports and power infrastructure to ArcelorMittal Nippon Steel in one of the largest post-pandemic merger and acquisition deals in India. In a statement, the Ruia-run firm said the deal also envisages a 50-50 joint venture between Essar and ArcelorMittal for building a 4 million tonnes a year LNG import terminal at Hazira in Gujarat. Without giving details, it only identified certain ports and power infrastructure that are primarily captive to operations of the Hazira steel plant, which was acquired by ArcelorMittal Nippon Steel (AM/NS) in 2018-19, as part of the deal.
India Inc is gearing up for a slugfest this year and from tech to paints, new battlegrounds are emerging, observes Indrajit Gupta, co-founder, Founding Fuel.
Giving a relief to exporters community, the government on Thursday said it will release Rs 56,027 crore to exporters against pending tax refunds under different incentive schemes for outbound shipments. The amount will be disbursed to more than 45,000 exporters. Briefing the media about the decision, Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal said that the Rs 56,027 crore, which is being released under various export promotion schemes, is over and above duty remission of Rs 12,454 crore for the Remission of Duties and Taxes on Export Products (RoDTEP) Scheme and Rs 6,946 crore for Rebate of State and Central Levies and Taxes (RoSCTL) Scheme already announced.
'EV-charging is the next big opportunity after fuelling'
The government introduced the 122nd Constitution amendment Bill.
Puri said ITC will focus on health and wellness products within the FMCG vertical. He also said the company will attempt to reinforce the existing categories in the FMCG segment.
China remains the elephant in the room and has to be tamed, which the United States alone is unable to do and therefore calls allies to come on board.
He said that following a build-up of troops, multiple transgressions and attempts to unilaterally change facts on the ground by China, there have been several levels of talks and a fair amount of communication to ensure that the matter can be resolved through negotiation and diplomacy.
The centre in Riyadh will be staffed by Saudi females and will start by catering to Saudi Aramco and GE as anchor clients.
ITC has extensively reset its strategy and will explore opportunities to craft disruptive business models to set up structural drivers helmed by digital and sustainability for its next horizon of growth and make the company future-ready, chairman Sanjiv Puri said on Wednesday. The company is pursuing an accelerated journey to build a dynamic utureTech' enterprise by investing in cutting-edge digital technologies to shape a new paradigm of competitiveness, create innovative business models and tap newer opportunities, he said while addressing shareholders at ITC's virtual annual general meeting. As part of the next horizon vision, the company is "proactively exploring inorganic opportunities" even as it has shrunk "business segments that were incongruent to our growth aspirations, such as the Lifestyle Retailing Business" while the existing growth platforms comprising megabrands will be scaled up and fortified.
The Indian Army has an inventory of over 500,000 items. At any time, the army has to be ready to rapidly deploy resources to various locations at short notice. Improved efficiency can occur with automation- and technology-based processes.
Indian plants -- who plan to begin production with 28 nano metre chips -- will take two to four years to get off the ground. By that time, in the fast changing world of chip making, the global market would have shifted to 22 nm.
India is the second-largest technology hub for Amazon globally and its teams are powering innovations not only for customers in the country but globally as well, a top company executive said on Thursday. Speaking at Amazon India Career Day, Amazon global senior vice president and country head India Amit Agarwal said the e-commerce company employs over one lakh professionals in India across diverse areas from engineering, supply chain, content creation, marketing, video and others. "India is also the second-largest technology hub for Amazon globally, with some of the most talented software developers, product managers, machine learning scientists, and research scientists as part of the team," he said.
With the implementation of the goods and services tax less than 75 days away -- assuming July 1 as the roll-out date -- Sudipto Dey provides a guide to how businesses can navigate the transition.
"Numerous rounds of talks have taken place with the Chinese counterparts to deescalate the situation without compromising on India's stand of 'complete disengagement and immediate restoration of status quo ante'," the defence ministry said.
The further expansion and upgrade of the Chinese military does not augur well for India, which continues to confront an increasingly belligerent China on its borders, notes former foreign secretary Shyam Saran.
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented her third Budget on February 1.
Brinkmanship in the Taiwan Strait will not only be a recipe for disaster to both China and Taiwan, but also to international peace and stability, warns Rup Narayan Das.
India's exports may have touched an all-time high of $422 billion in 2021-22 but recession in key western markets and geo-political crisis due to the Russia-Ukraine war are expected to impact the growth of the country's outbound shipments in 2023. All the global trade promoting factors like political stability, movement of goods, adequate availability of containers and shipping lines, demand, stable currency and smooth banking systems are in disarray. Adding to the woes, COVID cases have again started rising in countries like China, Japan, South Korea and the US.
The stimulus measures include extension of the 90-day moratorium on recognition of impaired loans to 180 days, in addition to several relaxations in bank lending limits, including allowing banks to fund interest on working capital loans.
India and the US also agreed to support the efforts of the Harvard Business School and the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad to develop a cluster map.
The JV, Voltbek Home Appliances, aims to take on LG, Samsung as well as home-grown players such as Godrej among others head on with a slew of products that hopes to combine the best of both worlds -- European technology and design, with Indian pricing and delivery.
The P-8I, which is widely acknowledged to be the world's most deadly LRMR-ASW aircraft, is a derivative of the Boeing 737-800 airliner, onto which a plethora of sensors and weaponry has been fitted.
Billionaire Gautam Adani on Sunday won the race to acquire Swiss cement major Holcim's stake in Ambuja Cements and its subsidiary ACC for $10.5 bn (around Rs 81,361 crore), including the open offers. The Adani family, through an offshore special-purpose vehicle, announced that it had entered into definitive agreements for the acquisition of Holcim Ltd's entire stake in two of India's leading cement companies -- Ambuja Cements and ACC -- the Adani group said in a statement. The group outbid Ultratech and JSW group to enter the cement industry and also emerge as the country's second-largest cement manufacturer, with 70 million tonnes of capacity annually.
Sical Logistics' board of directors, which met to consider approval of the June quarter financial results, asked the management to come out with recommendations for the same.
Prime Minister Modi, who is in Japan on a two-day visit to attend a summit of the Quad leaders at the invitation of his Japanese counterpart Fumio Kishida, penned an op-ed on the vibrant relations between India and Japan in the Yomiuri Shimbun.
Myntra CEO Ananth Narayanan, who was earlier against the merger of the two fashion e-tail companies, is learnt to be meeting each Jabong employee one-to-one.
Amazon
'The prospect is of a self-confident and self-sustaining India will make it a more effective player in the global arena,' External Affairs Minister Dr Subrahmanyam Jaishankar points out delivering the Sardar Patel Lecture-2020: India and the Post-Covid World.
The utility helicopters will be used in attack missions as well as for search and rescue and surveillance operations.
An India-Japan joint statement said the two leaders expressed serious concern over the conflict and the unfolding humanitarian crisis in Ukraine.
'Investors should reduce cash gradually and look for value investing.'