'In case the El Nino pattern plays out negatively and/or the political situation becomes messy, we may see markets correcting and waiting for the situation to become clear by early/mid-2024.'
The edtech major promised a learning revolution, offering hope to millions of under-educated youth. Now, those dreams are shattered, observes Devangshu Datta.
'India has formed tremendous resilience and still a strong growth.'
Fintech firm One97 Communications, which owns the Paytm brand, on Wednesday said its loss in the fourth quarter of the financial year 2023-24 has widened to Rs 550 crore following the ban imposed by the RBI on transactions related to its payments bank. The company had posted a loss of Rs 167.5 crore in the same period a year ago, the company said in a regulatory filing. "Our fourth quarter FY24 results were impacted by temporary disruption on account of UPI transition etc. and permanent disruption because of the PPBL embargo.
Investors are increasingly turning optimistic about shares of new-age companies. From broad-based 'sell' calls, analysts are giving thumbs up to Zomato, Paytm, and FSN e-Commerce Ventures-owned Nykaa as these companies have shifted focus to sustainable profits. The shares of Zomato hit a fresh 52-week high of Rs 126 apiece on the BSE on November 7, having rallied 15.4 per cent in one week.
In August, the Reserve Bank of India Governor Shaktikanta Das held a meeting with chief executive officers/ managing directors (CEOs/ MDs) of large non-banking financial corporations (NBFCs). The discussions included diversifying borrowing sources for NBFCs and housing finance companies (HFCs) to contain increasing reliance on bank borrowing, risks associated with high credit growth in retail segment in unsecured loans, prioritising IT upgrades and cyber-security, improving provisioning, monitoring of stressed exposures and slippages, ensuring robust liquidity and asset-liability management, ensuring transparency in pricing, creating robust grievance redress mechanisms.
'Given that the market is now demanding disciplined growth, well-run companies should be able to demonstrate profitability with the cash on hand.'
These unicorns, or startups valued at over USD 1 billion, are across industries, beyond technology and tech-enabled sectors as well, like pharmaceuticals, and consumer goods, Credit Suisse India equity strategist Neelkanth Mishra told reporters in Mumbai.
The share of non-resident Indians (NRIs) and overseas investors in Indian mutual funds has been declining over time, despite adding half-a-trillion rupees to holdings over the last five years. Mutual fund holdings for the segment went up from Rs 0.95 trillion as of December 2018 to Rs 1.54 trillion as of December 2022, shows Business Standard analysis of data from the industry body Association of Mutual Funds in India (Amfi). Their share in overall mutual fund assets has fallen from 4.2 per cent to 3.9 per cent during the same period.
Financial institutions are 300 times more vulnerable to cyberattacks than any other industry.
Prosus NV, which owns PayU, has terminated a $4.7 billion (about Rs 38,400 crore) deal to acquire Indian payments firm BillDesk, saying certain conditions precedent were not met. Prosus, the global investment arm of South African multinational Nasper, had on August 31 last year announced acquisition of BillDesk in an all-cash deal to expand its footprint in India's booming fintech sector under the umbrella of its payment gateway PayU.
A sharp rally in domestic stocks from June lows has once again rendered Indian markets expensive to their emerging-market (EM) peers. The 12-month forward price-to-earnings (P/E) multiple for the Nifty50 Index is around 20.6x - 82 per cent higher than 11.3 per cent for the MSCI EM Index. India's valuation premium has hit a five-month high. This is on the back of sharp outperformance to EM and global peers from June lows and also due to earnings downgrades, following the April-June quarter of 2022-23 earnings.
With the number of start-ups reaching the unicorn level falling drastically in 2023, the Hurun Unicorn Index said it has demoted eight gazelles - start-ups that were founded in 2000 and have the potential to go to unicorn in three years - to cheetahs.
Ashok Vaswani, a banker with more than three-and-half decades experience in building and scaling up businesses across consumer and corporate banking and payments, will be the next managing director (MD) and chief executive officer (CEO) of Kotak Mahindra Bank. Last week, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had given its approval to Vaswani's appointment. Vaswani is currently President of Pagaya Technologies, a US-Israeli artificial intelligence (AI) fintech firm, which he joined in June 2022.
Borrowing from a fraudulent loan app subjects the borrower to a variety of risks.
The banking regulator was uncomfortable with the runaway pace at which consumer credit was growing.
India has 50 startups with the potential to achieve the coveted 'unicorn' status in 2022 and by the end of the year, the list of the new-age companies valued at over $1 billion will be at least 100, a report by a consultancy firm said on Monday. In 2021, which witnessed a huge spike in company valuations in the listed and unlisted space driven by ample liquidity, according to some watchers, India added 43 startups to the list and the number of unicorns shot up to 68 by the end of the year. Over $10 billion was invested in the Indian startup ecosystem in the October-December quarter alone, according to the report by PwC India.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will visit Abu Dhabi on July 15.
Loan against gold as a product is catching on fast. Let's keep the momentum going, but aim for sustainable growth. A few bad apples should not ruin the brunch, argues Tamal Bandyopadhyay.
The International Financial Services Centre Authority (IFSCA) plans to operationalise the framework for direct listing of companies at International Financial Services Centre (IFSC) exchanges by the end of the year, said Chairperson K Rajaraman. He added that the amendments would be notified within three months. Further, the GIFT City regulator is also considering the launch of separate payments system regulations - similar to that of the real time gross settlement (RTGS) for banking within a few months.
Microsoft India on Tuesday said it has collaborated with Invest India to support tech startups in the country. As part of the partnership, the Microsoft for Startups programme will work closely with Accelerating Growth of New India's Innovations (AGNIi Mission) - a programme of the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India, a statement said. Housed and executed by Invest India, AGNIi Mission helps startups become enterprise-ready.
Indian startups received a record funding of $10.9 billion across 347 deals in the third quarter of 2021, according to a PwC India report. This is twice the amount of funding received in Q3 of the calendar year 2020 and an approximate increase of 41 per cent compared to the second quarter of 2021. An increase in funding activity was witnessed across all sectors in terms of value and volume.
The Reserve Bank is planning to extend wholesale Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) for transactions for interbank borrowing or call money market, sources said on Tuesday. The pilot in the wholesale segment, known as the Digital Rupee -Wholesale (e-W), was launched on November 1, 2022, with the use case being limited to the settlement of secondary market transactions in government securities. "RBI is now planning to go into the interbank borrowing market.
Within days of announcing mega investments for building in Hyderabad its second data centre cluster in India, Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Monday said it is excited about the India market, where cloud adoption offers massive headroom for growth. Pledging its long-term commitment to the India market, AWS, Amazon's cloud computing unit, said it expects global uncertainties to accelerate the decisions by companies to opt for flexible, on-demand cloud infrastructure to pare costs, gain efficiencies and drive business innovation. "Cloud reacts well to uncertainty," Puneet Chandok, president - commercial business, AWS India and South Asia, Amazon Internet Services Pvt Ltd (AISPL) told PTI.
'We went from zero to about 10 million users in three months. Paytm came out with the wallet play and we came out with the UPI play.'
In the June quarter of FY24, 51 per cent of consumers who took small-ticket personal loans already had more than four credit products at the time of accessing yet another new loan, compared with just 17 per cent in the June quarter of FY20, points out Tamal Bandyopadhyay.
The queue for mutual fund (MF) licences has thinned down due to quick clearances by the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) alongside applications being withdrawn amid regulatory changes. There were, at the end of September, only two pending MF applications: By AngelOne and Unifi Capital. By comparison, there were 11 applications lying before the market regulator at the start of calendar year 2023.
'Unless the government comes up with the rulebook, the technical requirements will not be clear to us.' 'Going by the Act, non-technical provisions can be complied with within six months.' 'But we need up to 24 months for provisions like parental consent.'
This makes it the most valued fintech company in the country after Paytm and Walmart-owned PhonePe.
Unlike the race to buy airwaves by telecom companies, airports by infrastructure companies and city gas networks by energy companies, the race to develop super apps by consumer-facing companies in India has not brushed up against any regulatory issues. Officials at the ministry of electronics and information technology and at other regulators are happy they do not have to meddle in who among the Tata group, Reliance Industries Ltd, Flipkart or Paytm will manage to build an app that sweeps in customers. Unlike separate apps a customer uses on her mobile to order groceries, buy food or airline tickets or just make payments, a super app can perform all these functions.
Get a new QR code from an alternative provider. PhonePe, Google Pay, Pine Labs, etc are some of the other service providers.
Nasper-backed fintech firm PayU has started talks to acquire domestic payment gateway major BillDesk, and the deal size could be in the range of $3-4 billion, sources in the know said. "BillDesk has been open to being acquired for some time now, but in the past the valuations that the company was seeking proved to be a hurdle," said a source. "Three years ago too, PayU had approached BillDesk for an acquisition, but things didn't go ahead due to high valuations. "BillDesk had asked for $2-billion value then," said the source.
The Indian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, Vikram Doraiswami, who was touring Scotland this week was blocked from entering a gurdwara in the capital Glasgow by pro-Khalistan extremists.
Foreign portfolio investors (FPI) flows have turned positive on a trailing 12-month (TTM) basis for the first time since December 2021. Thanks to robust inflows over the past three months, the TTM overseas flows into domestic equities stand at over $7.3 billion-the most since November 2021. This has helped propel one-year Nifty returns to 12 per cent.
Jobs in HR, administration and recruitment have seen a substantial rise as per Monster data with a 42% growth in job posting activity.
'Midcap and smallcap indices are trading in the expensive zone.'
A pan-India 'fraud-to-phone' network has been busted by security agencies, which have also arrested eight people and seized nearly 300 new mobile phones bought with stolen funds, officials said on Tuesday. Moreover, 900 mobile phones, 1,000 bank accounts and hundreds of unified payment interface (UPI) and e-commerce IDs of this gang have been identified and are under investigation. Nearly 100 bank accounts, and debit and credit cards have been frozen by the security agencies so far, officials said.
Zaggle Prepaid, Cyient DLM, Healthvista India, Rashi Peripherals and Vishwaraj Sugar Industries have obtained the green signal to launch their initial public offerings (IPOs). The approvals come at a time when capital raising by way of IPOs has slowed to a crawl, with only four issues hitting the market so far this calendar year. Recently, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) issued final observation letters on their draft red herring prospectuses (DRHPs), which is akin to getting approval to hit the markets.
Investors seem to be shying away from stocks of companies in the 'digital' space with most counters that comprise the Nifty India Digital index giving negative returns over the past year. The index tracks the performance of a portfolio of stocks that broadly represent the 'digital theme' within basic industries, such as software, e-commerce, IT-enabled services, industrial electronics, and telecom services. The fall in some of these stocks over the past year has been steep; the sharpest decline of around 60 per cent was seen in shares of PB Fintech (parent company of Policybazaar).
The Indian startup ecosystem recently celebrated the 100th unicorn milestone. It came after a month of no big fund announcements. Compare this to 2021, when three to four unicorns were being added every month. Nevertheless, the 100th unicorn needs to be celebrated since the first unicorn was announced in 2011 - 11 years ago.
