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.
Before Data Patterns developed an indigenous check-out equipment, Brahmos Aerospace was paying a Russian supplier three times what it will now pay the Indian company.
Former Indian cricketer Sachin Tendulkar has joined pre-owned car retailing platform Spinny as a strategic investor and lead brand endorser, the company said in a release on Tuesday. Spinny, however, did not disclose the amount of investment by Tendulkar in the company. Spinny recently became a Unicorn with the closing of a $283 million Series-E round of funding, which took the total capital raised by the platform to more than 530 million and giving it a valuation of $1.8 billion.
The government believes firms which are subject to China's laws could be forced to hand over information to Beijing's security services.
Customers of MG's upcoming mid-size SUV will benefit from Jio's widespread internet outreach, along with the connectivity, not only in metros but also in small towns and rural areas, MG Motor said in a statement. "Technology and innovation are leading the connected car space in the automobile industry.
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.
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.
India added over 1,300 active tech start-ups to its ecosystem in calendar year 2022, taking the total tally to between 25,000-27,000, according to a recent report. The country continues to be the world's third largest tech start-up ecosystem. The Nasscom-Zinnov Indian Tech Start-up Landscape Report 2022 found that India added the second highest number of Unicorns - companies with a valuation of at least $1 billion - in the world, with over 23 added in CY2022.
rediffGURU Ashish Sehgal, who holds a doctorate in neuro linguistic programming, mental health and social welfare, offers relationship advice.
Uber Technologies said it is doing a fresh round of recruitment for its India tech centres and is planning to hire 500 more tech employees by December. The app-based mobility and delivery company has a 1,000-member tech team across its centres in Hyderabad and Bengaluru. The firm said the hiring plan is a testament to Uber's commitment to India, and its recognition of the engineering talent in the country. Uber hired 250 engineers to its India teams in 2021.
Believe it or not, the regulator is even stretching its arm to identify stressed borrowers and gauge the 'distance to default' as a measure of a particular bank's fragility, reveals Tamal Bandyopadhyay.
Redress for a victim is not easy. It is not really painful to file a cyber-crime complaint.
But someone who is technically unsophisticated enough to fall for a scam will find it hard to navigate the processes, points out Devangshu Datta.
'From our perspective, it will bring additional customers and from their perspective, it will get them younger customers.'
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will present the Union Budget for 2023-24 in Parliament on February 1. The Budget is a statement of the government's estimated receipts and expenditures for a fiscal year (April 1 to March 31). It's divided into Revenue and Capital Budget. The Revenue Budget includes the government's revenue receipts and expenditures while the Capital Budget includes its capital receipts and payments.
The applications range from disaster recovery to predicting demand and understanding customer choices using artificial intelligence.
"It went up to 20-odd per cent in 2019 and to 25 per cent a year later. "That's when we decided to pull the plug; it was not sustainable for our business," says Chadha. Madison & Pike, instead, turned to Mumbai-based start-up Thrive, which provides third-party delivery services to restaurants at a much lower commission - three to five per cent.
The application makes it easy for IBM partners and clients like Polaris to build an entirely new class of cloud-based social business apps.
Providing services like broadband connectivity, cable TV, enterprise solutions, and payment wallets is the need of the hour for telcos, and a second wave of consolidation is upon the industry, a rating agency said on Tuesday. India Ratings and Research said the sector, which was battered following the aggressive entry of Reliance Jio, will continue showing signs of recovery amid conducive regulatory environment and maintained a "stable" outlook for the industry in FY22. The second round of consolidation (Consolidation 2.0) is kicking-in in the industry, which will bring a transformation in the business models of telecom companies, leading to the evolution of incumbents from the providers of traditional voice-only services to complete digital solutions for households, it said.
Amid a shift in mobility trends and people increasingly opting for less polluting energy sources, sales of compressed natural gas (CNG) vehicles increased more than 82 per cent in the past five years. A total of 729,902 CNG vehicles were sold in 2022-23 against 400,825 in 2017-18, according to VAHAN Dashboard. Though the increase in sales of CNG-powered vehicles has been significant, their share in overall vehicle sales remains minuscule as is the case with EVs.
Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel have enough capacity to absorb over 113.9 million Vodafone Idea subscribers who are on 4G if Vodafone Idea has to shut operations.
Immunity boosting foods and drinks. Sustainable fashion. Beauty products with natural ingredients. There was always a market for these, and the pandemic has only made it bigger. Within beauty, brands have recorded a greater demand for ayurveda products.
IT company Wipro on Friday posted a 4 per cent rise in consolidated profit at Rs 3,092.5 crore in the fourth quarter ended March 2022. The company had registered a profit of Rs 2,974.1 crore in the same period a year ago. "We have had an outstanding year, finishing with USD 10.4 billion in revenues, and an industry-leading growth of 27 per cent Year-on-Year (Y-o-Y).
Education finance is a complex and dynamic sector. There are too many variables -- the course, the calibre of students, the universities, and the job prospects once the course is over, notes Tamal Bandyopadhyay.
Tata Motors on Monday launched the country's first CNG truck in the medium and heavy commercial (M&HCV) vehicle segment in the 28- and 19-tonne nodes. Most truck makers, including Tata Motors, currently offer CNG only in the small and light commercial vehicle segments. The company also launched a fleet of seven trucks in the intermediary and light commercial vehicle (I&LCV) segment, meant for varied applications.
The cement plants at Barmana (Bilaspur district) and Darlaghat (Solan district) had closed operations on December 14 due to the dispute between the company and truckers engaged in the carriage of cement and clinkers. According to a government statement, Chief Minister Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu said, "We have arrived at consensus, thereby protecting the interests of both the truck-operator unions and the management, besides welfare of all others who were being directly or indirectly hit by the stalemate."
Tech major Lenovo on Thursday said it is significantly ramping up its local manufacturing capabilities in India across product categories like PCs, notebooks and smartphones to meet the increasing customer demand. While the company did not disclose the investment being made, Lenovo said it is expanding in India across all business lines, including PC and smart devices, smart phones, infrastructure solutions, and especially in the newly established services and solutions group. Lenovo has expanded its in-house PC manufacturing plant in Puducherry to include a third manufacturing line, while it has started local manufacturing of its tablet computers in partnership with Wingtech Technology in Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh.
India's first home-grown mapping company MapMyIndia is looking to list in the public market by raising around Rs 1,200 crore at a Rs 6,000-crore valuation. Sources said the company is ready with its draft red herring prospectus documents and is likely to file as early as next week. While the money will be used for business expansion, it will also give MapMyIndia's early investors, including Qualcomm, PhonePe, and Japanese mapmaker Zenrin Co., a chance to exit. The Verma family, which founded the company, will continue to remain promoters.
How many of the apps downloaded in India deliver the GPT technology they say they are?
By framing the right question, Satya Nadella directed his team's attention to searching for the right answer, which opened up a treasure trove of new business opportunities, which would have remained undiscovered but for framing the right question.
Diversified entity ITC Ltd on Tuesday said it has entered into a partnership with IIT Delhi to support research in identified STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) areas. A memorandum of understanding has been signed to this effect with the institute with an aim to accelerate India's journey towards achieving its sustainable development goals (SDGs), ITC said in a statement. Currently, the areas identified for research are energy storage, low carbon cold transportation, and plastic biodegradation to name a few and will further pave the way for more research in the areas of mutual interest, it added.
LIC identifies the problems well, but what the markets will watch is how nimble it is with the solutions.
Named "HomoSEP", ten units are planned to be deployed across Tamil Nadu and the researchers are in touch with sanitation workers to identify the locations, officials said.
In the first such collaboration for India, the country's flagship payments platform, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), and Singapore's PayNow payment system have launched a real-time cross-border payment linkage system. The linkage, which was launched by Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi and Singapore's PM Lee Hsien Loong on Tuesday, was kicked off by a live cross-border transaction between Reserve Bank of India Governor Shaktikanta Das and Monetary Authority of Singapore managing director Ravi Menon, using mobile phones.
Sources said much has been done to ease the tax burden of the middle classes in the last five years, and that such a measure affects only a limited segment of people when the focus should be to put money in rural areas. Archis Mohan reports.
The demand for global solutions is pushing Indian BPOs to grow aggressively into global centres, said a senior executive. For instance, in the past 18 months, WNS has expanded its presence in the Philippines, Romania, and now Latin America. Analysts believe the trend will only increase in the days ahead, as clients look for outsourcing partners that can support critical processes from multiple delivery centres.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday said his government is using all channels including diplomatic to bring back high-profile economic offenders, leaving them with no option but to return to the country. Speaking at a symposium on credit flow and economic growth, he asked banks to support wealth and job creators with proactive lending while promising to stand by any loans given in right earnest. "In our attempt to bring back fugitive (economic offenders), we relied on policies and law and also used diplomatic channels.
Domestic-focused agricultural chemical (agrochem) companies could face near-term headwinds, given the worries on the El Nio effect on monsoons, higher inventory, and pressure on margins. Some of these were reflected in the October-December quarter (third quarter, or Q3) results of companies and may impact them in the current quarter (fourth quarter, or Q4) as well. Nuvama Research pointed out that the sector witnessed mixed performance during the quarter as global agrochem and domestic fertiliser companies maintained growth momentum, while adverse agronomical conditions and excess channel inventory weighed on domestic market volume offtake.
The government is looking to plug loopholes in the Indian customs law provision that allows tax exemptions for gifts up to Rs 5,000 and trade samples up to Rs 10,000 sent to India from abroad.
'I would like to believe that out of this struggle (to effect climate change) will be born a generation that will be able to look upon the world with clearer eyes than those that preceded it; that they will be able to transcend the isolation in which humanity was entrapped in the time of its derangement; that they will rediscover their kinship with other beings, and that this vision, at once new and ancient, will find expression in a transformed and renewed art and literature.'
The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the Goods and Service Tax (GST) Council's recommendations are not binding on Union and State but have a persuasive value as the country has a cooperative federal structure.