By his own admission, the last 30 months have been one of the toughest in Thomas Varghese's 29-year career. The 50-year-old chief executive of Aditya Birla Retail, however, quickly adds that they have been 'very interesting and challenging too'.
Since the beginning of 2020, i-bankers have collected nearly Rs 1,800 crore by way of IPO fees. Interestingly, the India fees this year form just 1 per cent of the global fee pool of $13.7 billion from IPOs.
Mining baron Anil Agarwal-led Vedanta Group has bid for the most number of 14 coal mines out of 23 on offer in the first round of auction which also have aggressive bids by Aditya Birla Group, Adani and Naveen Jindal group, but was shunned by foreign players.
Retail players are planning to expand but with caution. It seems the slowdown of 2008-09 is still weighing on their minds.
IT major Wipro's Azim Premji donated Rs 22 crore a day or Rs 7,904 crore in a year to emerge as the most generous Indian in FY20 and top a list of philanthropy. Premji pipped HCL Technologies' Shiv Nadar, who had earlier topped the list collated by Hurun Report India and Edelgive Foundation, by a wide margin.
Ajit Mishra, vice president, Research, Religare Broking, answers your queries.
Aditya Birla group flagship firm Hindalco Industries has decided to trim its overseas operations and is restructuring its capital expenditure in India in an effort to stabilise operations. As part of this overall plan, Novelis, which Hindalco acquired for $6 billion in 2007, is closing its sheet mill at Rogerstone in the UK, involving 440 job losses.
Despite near-term headwinds of rising input costs and the possibility of lower demand for products as Covid dented rural & urban India, and impacts both production & consumption, analysts remain bullish on stocks of fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) companies and expect the index to relatively outperform its peers in the second half of fiscal 2021-22 (FY22). In the past one year, prices of key commodities such as groundnut oil, mustard oil, Vanaspati, soya oil, sunflower oil and palm oil have shot up in the range of 20 per cent to 60 per cent, data show. The FMCG sector macros in this backdrop, according to analysts, have further deteriorated because of weakness in consumer demand and likely margin pressure due to elevated crude oil, palm oil and global food prices.
ASSET India Foundation's mission is to educate children of women in prostitution and girls rescued from trafficking for by providing computer literacy.
Protests following the arrest of Maharashtra Navnirman Sena chief Raj Thackeray on Tuesday crippled retail businesses in and around Mumbai, the commercial capital of the country
Aditya Birla Group company Idea Cellular today said it expects to start 3G services in the third quarter of the ongoing fiscal.
Nikunj Saraf, Vice President Choice Wealth, answers your queries.
Nikunj Saraf, Vice President Choice Wealth, will answers your queries.
Kumar Mangalam Birla-led Aditya Birla Group plans to invest over Rs 4,000 crore in future technologies by setting up a Knowledge Park and a branch of the Birla Institute of Technology and Sciences (BITS) at Kozhikode in Kerala.
Omkeshwar Singh, Head, Rank MF, a mutual fund investment platform, answers your queries.
Many, including DLF, Suzlon, UB, the Tata and the Aditya Birla Group are selling stake or assets to reduce debt and the strain on their balance sheets. That's because they have been hit either by slowing sales, or have a big exposure to markets in the West where demand has contracted sharply as a result of the economic downturn.
Though private labels comprise 10 to 12 per cent of the overall FMCG volumes, analysts said they were recording double-digit growth annually and could pose problems for the big players in the near future.
Omkeshwar Singh, Head, Rank MF, a mutual fund investment platform, answers your queries.
Bharti Airtel chairman Sunil Mittal has expressed hope that the government and regulators will step in to ensure the sector remains a viable place for continued investments and asserted that the industry requires "long overdue" support to maintain its current 3+1 structure. In the latest annual report of Airtel, Mittal said as the sector's role in the economy becomes more pervasive, its challenges loom larger. Issues such as unsustainable pricing and low returns in a highly capital-intensive environment, coupled with legacy legal issues, "have extracted their toll", Mittal observed.
Omkeshwar Singh, Head, Rank MF, a mutual fund investment platform, answers your queries.
While some like RPG's Spencer's and Wadhawan group's Spinach say it will encourage them to invest more in cold chains, others such as Aditya Birla Retail and Future Group said the announcement has come too late and helps fresh produce and chilled product suppliers more than retailers.
India Inc believes that given the current economic slowdown, it could not have been any better
Five others, including one retired and another serving public servant -- K S Kropha and K C Samria -- were held guilty for various offences under the Prevention of Corruption Act and Indian Penal Code.
Amid an existential crisis facing the firm over Rs 50,000 crore unpaid dues towards the government, billionaire Kumar Mangalam Birla on Wednesday stepped down as the chairman of Vodafone Idea Ltd. Birla -- who had in June offered to give away his holding in the joint venture with Britain's Vodafone to the government -- will cease to be a director and non-executive chairman of the company at the end of business hours on Wednesday, VIL said in a filing to the stock exchanges. It did not give any reason for Birla's decision. He will be replaced by Himanshu Kapania (who was earlier managing director and CEO of Birla's Idea Cellular) as the new chairman of Vodafone Idea Ltd.
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.
The Aditya Birla Group has received in-principle approval from the Kerala government to set up a Rs 4,000-crore (Rs 40 billion) IT and Biotech Knowledge Park and a branch of Birla Institute of Technology and Sciences (BITS) at Kozhikode.
This also shows that there are other skills that go into a success story than mere ideas.
Idea Cellular, the GSM service provider of the Aditya Birla group, has roped in global telecom major Ericsson as equipment supplier for its GSM network in the Mumbai circle.
After Vodafone, UK-based Vedanta Resources Plc and Aditya Birla group firm Indian Rayon also face a potential tax demand of around Rs 900 crore and Rs 45 crore, respectively, for their failure to deduct taxes on payments to buy Indian assets, said a senior government official.
Analysts say large firms in these segments don't need loan recast due to the efficient manner in which many of them operate.
Raman's hacking expertise is much in demand -- and not from criminal elements. Indian firms and multinationals like ABN Amro Bank, Aditya Birla Group, Bank of Maharashtra, Bombay Dyeing, HSBC, ICICI Bank, Indiabulls, Centurion BOP, Citibank, India Infoline, Ispat Industries and Kotak Group proactively seek his services. Raman's hacking expertise is much in demand -- and not from criminal elements.
GSM operators added 8.89 million subscribers in June, taking the total number of subscribers using the technology to 315.8 million.
In the two weeks since the terror attacks in Mumbai, most of the large Indian business groups in the city have been conspicuous by their absence in offering help to terror victims.
With confidence creeping back into the market place and rentals down up to 50 per cent, large retailers are back to drawing up aggressive growth plans. In the next one year, Aditya Birla Retail, Bharti Enterprises, Reliance Retail, Trent, Mahindra Retail and others hope to open new stores spread over five million square feet.
Omkeshwar Singh, Head, Rank MF, a mutual fund investment platform, answers your queries.
Nikunj Saraf, Vice President Choice Wealth, answers your queries.
The brand integration not only marks the completion of the largest telecom merger in the world, but will also set the company on its future journey to offer strong digital experiences to 1 billion Indians on its 4G network.
"When we are building businesses with a long-term view, we are less concerned about short-term impacts. The basic growth in India, the high savings rate and low penetration of financial products suggest there is a huge yet-to-be-tapped opportunity. We believe this is a good time to be building businesses to tap that potential," says Ajay Srinivasan, CEO, Aditya Birla Group's Financial Services.
Idea announced the lowest tariff for mobile users in the city offering all local calls for 40 paise per minute on its network for a period of one year, and STD and SMS at 50 paise per minute, on any mobile and landline network.
UltraTech said its board will meet on Tuesday to consider a proposal from Samruddhi Cement to merge the cement business of group with itself.
