Innholdsfortegnelse for April 24, 2016 i Business Today

You might have noticed that in the past few months, the news coming out of India’s $17-billion e-commerce sector has been decidedly mixed. While there are reports of new rounds of money being raised at higher valuations and new unicorns being created – ShopClues was the latest one to achieve that distinction in January 2016 – it has often been drowned out by news of sackings in the e-commerce sector, ugly spats between founders and their investors, closures of companies in the food tech and grocery space, and others. Recently, a Morgan Stanley mutual fund wrote down the valuation of its investment in the poster boy of India’s e-commerce sector, Flipkart. For some time now, a degree of realism has been also creeping into the Silicon Valley, which most high-profile…

4-5 MAKING INDIA COMPETITIVE WHAT: CII Annual General Meeting and National Conference WHEN: April 4-5, New Delhi WHAT TO LOOK FOR: Building National Competitiveness being the theme for this year’s conference, expect attendance of a galaxy of leaders from industry and government. Finance minister Arun Jaitley will be the chief guest for the inaugural session. Other sessions will including speakers such as Roads Minister Nitin Gadkari, Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar, Railways Minister Suresh Prabhu and Communications Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, among a host of other ministers, bureaucrats and CEOs. 04 PROTECTING BRANDS WHAT: FICCI Conference on Digital Advertising: Protecting Brand Integrity & Stimulating Content Creation WHEN: 4 April, New Delhi WHAT TO LOOK FOR: Sessions are aimed at online advertisers to help them protect their brand image from inadvertent association…

Indians expect a big hike in remuneration when changing jobs 2% No change or reduction 2% Less than 10% 9% 10-15% 24% 16-20% Figures are per cent of respondents expecting minimum increase on fixed cost to company Source: 2015/2016 Michael Page India Employee Intentions report 34% 26% or above 29% 21-25% A majority of recruiters are expected to give increments in the range of 5 to 15 per cent this year E-commerce and technology-driven start-ups are expected to offer the best salary hikes The average salary hike has been range-bound over the past five years However, India still offers the best hikes in the Asia Pacific region…

“THIS CLINICAL DESIGN ALLOWS AN ABBREVIATED DEVELOPMENT PATHWAY THAT ASSURES SAFETY AND EFFICACY THROUGH TRIALS THAT REDUCE BOTH COST AND TIME.”Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, CMD, Biocon On March 30, the Drug Controller General of India met a dozen-odd industry associations to discuss some new measures, including the critical guidelines on biosimilars. It is an area where differences seem to be emerging between local biotech companies and the global MNCs operating in India. While the domestic biopharmaceutical industry led by Indian biotech major Biocon is appreciating the efforts of the drug controller, some sections of MNCs seem unhappy with both the content and making of the draft guidelines. One of the critical elements in the guidelines that has got the local industry excited is the clause mandating a base number of at least…

Names of members of Lok Sabha, Rajya Sabha and state legislatures who have not given up their subsidised LPG connections Details of expenses incurred during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's foreign visits in 2015 Names of members on the panel that evaluated the process for identification of cities for the Smart City programme Names of 150 social media influencers who met Prime Minister Narendra Modi on July 1, 2015, at his residence. The PMO said it had no information about such a meeting Details of CSR spends by all companies in India with over `100 crore net worth as mandated by the new Companies Act.…

Last year, Saudi Aramco, which buys naphtha from ONGC, received an e-mail asking it to deposit 100 crore for its latest purchase in a new bank account with Bangkok Bank Public Company Ltd instead of the usual State Bank of India account. The Saudi Arabia-based company did so in September. Same month, it deposited another `97 crore in the new account for the same deal. But ONGC never got the money. On October 7, when it got an e-mail from Aramco about the transfer, it knew something was wrong. It had been defrauded by cybercriminals through a trick called the man-in-the-middle in which a person, probably an insider, writes an e-mail on behalf of the company for re-directing a payment to an account operated by the fraudsters themselves. This person…

Originals By Adam Grant, Price: 699 The author explores how to recognise a good idea, speak up without getting silenced, build a coalition of allies, choose the right time to act, and manage fear and doubt. BUSINESS BESTSELLERS* Thinking, Fast and Slow By Daniel Kahneman Penguin Price: 499 ELON MUSK By Ashlee Vance Virgin Books Price: 699 Steve Jobs By Walter Isaacson Little, Brown Book Group Price: 550 The Golden Tap By Kashyap Deorah Roli Books Price: 595 The Mastery Manual By Robin Sharma Jaico Publishing House Price: 199 *Top books by sales for Mar 13 - Mar 26, 2016; Includes only books released after Jan 1, 2015; Information provided by…

Indomitable Spirit From being a gas attendant in Aden, Dhirubhai Ambani became the richest Indian in a few decades. Recently, he was posthumously awarded the Padma Vibhushan by the government for leaving a deep imprint on India’s corporate history. In his illustrious lifetime, Ambani turned the fortunes of thousands of shareholders who invested in his ambitious ventures. Reliance Industries, a company he founded, started the largest oil refinery in the country in 1999. Today, it has interests in areas such as petrochemicals, textiles, telecom and retail. Treading with Caution The US Central bank has decided to move cautiously on the issue of interest rates. Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen said that global uncertainty – slowdown in China and weak oil prices – and low inflation require her to make only…

Regular cash flow Life after retirement means living on an income generated through investments. The cash flow has to be predicable. Any uncertainty at this stage could translate into challenges on your daily expenses. If you ignore it, it could be very stressful Keeping up with inflation Inflation cannot be wished away. Given that capital is constant, a certain percentage of savings should be invested in products that would help your money grow. Otherwise, the individual faces the danger of running out of money Capital protection Capital protection is crucial. While planning your investments, you have got to opt for financial products that offer a certain degree of capital protection. Erosion in capital is a risk that a retired person cannot afford to take Liquidity in Investments In case of…

The jury used both qualitative and quantitative factors to select the best banks Indian stock markets reached new highs in 2014-15, especially after the new government took charge in May 2014. The BSE Sensex rose 25 per cent during the period. The year was full of great opportunities for investors. In such a scenario, many financial institutions did exceedingly well. They not only provided high returns but also ensured investors’ stability and financial well-being. To honour and recognise them, we bring the third edition of Business Today-Money Today Financial Awards. The awards considered the entire value chain to identify financial service providers — banks, insurance and mutual funds — which have performed the best in their categories. India’s Best Banks-Methodology and KPMG have been partners for this study since 1997.…

The Man at the Helm of Infosys This refers to your cover story on Vishal Sikka of Infosys (Re-imagining Infosys, April 10). The man at the helm was among the top 50 CEOs in Glassdoor’s annual Employees’ Choice Awards for the Highest Rated CEOs in 2015. He is probably the right man to bring back Infosys into the high-growth mode, which was lagging behind on growth prospects for many years. No doubt, the company had lost its direction on many fronts. Employee morale had taken a hit and its conservative attitude added to the problems. But the million-dollar question is: Will the company revive its lost glory under the leadership of Sikka? Wait and watch! Namita M., Faridabad NITI Aayog: A Toothlesss Tiger This refers to your article on…

Think about the often-pointless rigmarole of attending to work e-mails, then waiting for responses or following up and you know why productivity and e-mails don’t really make the best bedfellows. This is a problem Slack is looking to solve by enabling real-time messaging between teams of all sizes. The lure is disarmingly simple – Slack promises to make work teams more productive by largely reducing the need for meetings and e-mails. It is like a chat/messaging app that can be used across multiple platforms and devices, with robust features such as one-to-one and group messaging, file sharing plus integration into several popular apps and web services. The key to Slack is that it is fun to use – a word typically not associated with any sort of enterprise software. Slack…

The board of Tata Steel has decided that it will not inject more capital in its beleaguered UK business. It has also announced a plan to exit the country “in whole or in parts”. This can be read in two ways. One, Tata Steel has accepted that its 2007 deal to buy Corus, of which the UK business was a part, for $12 billion was a mistake, and the people who struck it failed to rightly assess the risks involved. Two, the UK government has little concern for the Tata Group, a major investor that also owns car maker Jaguar Land Rover and Tetley Tea in the country. The ambitious Corus acquisition was touted as a symbol of the arrival of Indian companies on the global stage. With this, Tata…

2G spectrum scam: Responses to RTI applications of activists such as Subhash Chandra Agarwal and Vivek Garg revealed how mobile phone companies were undercharged for spectrum. This cost the exchequer over `1,70,000 crore (as per the CAG). One of the biggest scams in India was a big embarrassment for the UPA government. Adarsh Society scam: The 31-storey building in Mumbai's Colaba was supposed to be a six-storey housing society for war widows and heroes of the 1999 Kargil War. Activists Simpreet Singh and Yogacharya Anandji used RTI to expose how politicians, bureaucrats and military officials flouted rules to acquire flats below market rates. It led to the resignation of the then Chief Minister Ashok Chavan. Commonwealth Games Scam: RTI applications filed by activists and ordinary citizens highlighted inflated bills, cost…

MAN-IN-THE MIDDLE ATTACK: The attacker gets in between two parties — the company and its clients — by impersonating as the former and diverts payments to his account. EXAMPLE: ONGC lost `197 crore when cybercriminals duplicated its official e-mail address and used it to convince a Saudi Arabia-based client to transfer money to their account. DENIAL OF SERVICES: Multiple systems are used to target a website by exceeding the limit of concurrent users it can handle. The site crashes and resumes only after the company pays the criminals. EXAMPLE: HSBC UK’s website faced such an attack in January this year. Customers could not access services for hours PHISHING/SPOOFING: Creating a forged email id or IP address and impersonating to get sensitive information that can be used for monetary gains EXAMPLE:…

Here are the findings of a survey by global cross-border payments platform Payoneer Men freelancers in India charge an average 11 per cent more than women Most freelancers are in the 20-29 year bracket The average hourly rate (in the 180 countries surveyed) is $21. The average hourly rate in India is slightly lower ($19) 55 per cent Indian professionals charge under $10 an hour, 29 per cent between $11 and $30, and 15 per cent over $30 per hour Sample size: 23,006 worldwide, 1,973 in India; period: November-December 2014…

UBox: Android, Free With e-mail, WhatsApp and Twitter becoming the preferred modes of communication, messages have taken a backseat. And we often end up missing important messages in between all the spam we receive every day, despite registering for DND. UBox is a neat app that segregates messages according to their nature, without messing up with the original messaging app. Ubox divides messages under banking, bills, bookings, chats and promos. Under chats, all the communication with your contacts and unknown numbers is stored, whereas all banking related messages are listed under the banking head. The app works beautifully, eliminating the need of browsing through the long list of messages when you are looking for a particular one. The remaining messages appear on the homepage of the app and that needs…

Scenario 1 If you earn less Start by investing `1,000 per month and increase that amount by 10 per cent every year. Over 32 years, assuming 12 per cent returns, this modest sum will grow to `1.03 crore Scenario 2 If you have no time to plan Open a balanced or diversified mutual fund and automate your investment – every month a particular sum will be deducted towards your retirement goal. Easy and safe Scenario 3 If you start late If possible, postpone retirement by a couple of years. Start by cutting down on discretionary spends and channelise savings into a hybrid fund. Stay away from high-risk products Scenario 4 If you can’t follow-up Asset allocation is a tough call. If you fear your investment cart is not balanced, opt…

We have chosen winners on the basis of one-year and three-year data Equity markets ended 2014-15 with a bang, hitting new highs. The BSE Sensex rose 25 per cent during the year. This attracted investors to mutual funds. Investor folios rose from Rs 3.95 crore to Rs 4.17 crore between March 2014 and March 2015. Assets under management (AUM) rose from Rs 9,05,120.69 crore to Rs 11,88,690.32 crore. Mutual funds act as a bridge between investors and markets. That is why we decided to honour fund houses that made risks that investors took with their hard-earned money worthwhile for them by giving high returns. Methodology We have chosen winners on the basis of performance of funds in the selected categories on the basis of one-year and three-year data ended March…

AUCTIONS, AUCTIONS... It is time to sell off properties and recover dues. The Supreme Court recently asked SEBI to sell off Sahara group properties worth an estimated `40,000 crore in order to recover dues that it owes investors. Meanwhile, SBI Caps has been trying in vain to auction off Kingfisher House in Mumbai. And the service tax department is trying to hawk Mallya’s private Airbus A319 to recover its own dues... FLIPKART VS SNAPDEAL A twitter spat broke out between Sachin Bansal, co-founder of Flipkart and Kunal Bahl, co-founder of Snapdeal, over the fate of their respective companies. Bansal tweeted that Alibaba’s reported decision to start operations directly in India was a poor reflection on its investments – alluding to Paytm and Snapdeal. Bahl snapped back that Morgan Stanley “flushed…

Test Mode Facebook has added a new feature that alerts a user if someone creates a fake profile using their profile photo and name, according to US-based digital media website Mashable. Facebook began testing this feature in November last year and has, so far, launched it in about 75 per cent of its markets. The company plans to expand it to other markets, too, soon. By this feature, Facebook would be able to detect fake profiles being created and send the concerned user an alert automatically, asking him to indentify whether the profile is impersonating him or not. The impersonated accounts will also be checked manually by the Facebook team. Going Live Google has decided to join the live video app bandwagon, which is quite the rage today, by creating…

IF THE BANKS AGREE TO A LARGE ‘HAIRCUT’ ON THEIR OUTSTANDING, IT MIGHT SET A PRECEDENT FOR OTHER WILLFUL DEFAULTERS After weeks of public outcry and intense media scrutiny, embattled UB Group Chairman Vijay Mallya has made an offer to settle outstanding loans of his now defunct Kingfisher Airlines (KFA). Mallya had provided personal guarantees for some of the loans availed by UB Holdings Ltd. (UBHL), the parent company of KFA. Cumulatively Mallya and his companies owe a 17-member bank consortium, led by State Bank of India, a sum of `9,091 crore. Mallya through his lawyers in the Supreme Court offered to settle the outstanding loans for a sum of 4,000 crore. While the whereabouts of Mallya, who left the country on March 2 is not exactly known – reports…

The process of accessing information should be transparent, timely and trouble-free. Delayed information does not help solve problems but compounds them. Timely information can halt wrong decisions. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, addressing a two-day national convention to mark 10 years of RTI in October last year Between June 2014 and August 2015, Noida-based Lokesh Batra, retired Navy Commodore and a veteran of RTI applications, having filed over 600 of them so far, filed a series of over 30 applications with the Prime Minister’s Office, the Ministry of External Affairs and various Indian missions abroad, enquiring about the expenses incurred on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s foreign trips since he assumed office in May 2014. The response to a large majority of the applications was a terse : “The bills are still…

Karan Adani gives away very little in his interactions. But the elder son of Gautam Adani, a management graduate from Purdue University in the US, who was elevated from Executive Director to CEO of Adani Ports and SEZ Ltd (APSEZ) in January this year, is upfront about his intention to make the company – already the country’s leading private port operator – even bigger. “We are planning not only for the biggest vessels which are plying the seas right now, but also for bigger ones still on the drawing board,” he says. The reference is to the new port of Vizhinjam the company is building in Kerala. The 7,525-crore project, a collaborative effort with the Kerala government and set for completion before 2020, will have a capacity of 3.5 million…

In some cases, multinational companies specify different programmes for start-ups at different stages of their life cycles Most people are aware of Japanese business practices, including Toyota’s famed Kanban (just-in-time technique) or TQM (total quality management), or Kaizen (continuous improvement) or Muri, Muda and Mura, emphasising on the right way of doing things. These innately Japanese concepts took the world by storm between 1989 and 2003. The latest concept from the ‘land of the rising sun’ creating a buzz in India, which has been aspiring to become a global manufacturing power under its Make in India initiative, is Monozukuri. Translated from Japanese, Monozukuri literally means ‘production’ or ‘making of things’. In a broader sense, however, it embodies a synthesis of technological prowess, knowhow and spirit of Japan’s manufacturing practices. At…

1999 JACK MA FOUNDS ALIBABA IN HIS HANGZHOU APARTMENT ALIBABA.COM IS LAUNCHED FOCUS BUILD E-COMMERCE PLATFORM FOR SMALL EXPORT COMPANIES 2003 TAOBAO MARKETPLACE, AN ONLINE SHOPPING SITE, IS LAUNCHED FOCUS TAP EXPLODING CONSUMER DEMAND IN CHINA 2004 ALIPAY IS LAUNCHED ALIWANGWANG, WHICH ALLOWS INSTANT MESSAGING ON TAOBAO, IS LAUNCHED FOCUS BUILD BASIC INFRASTRUCTURE AND BOOST CONSUMER CONFIDENCE IN DOING BUSINESS ONLINE 2008 TAOBAO MALL, AN ONLINE B2C MARKETPLACE LATER RENAMED TMALL, IS LAUNCHED FOCUS FOSTER THE DEVELOPMENT OF E-COMMERCE ECOSYSTEM 2009 ALIBABA CLOUD COMPUTING IS FOUNDED 2010 ALIEXPRESS, AN ONLINE INTERNATIONAL CONSUMER WEBSITE, IS LAUNCHED FOCUS START GLOBALISATION 2011 TMALL AND ETAO ARE SPUN OFF FROM TAOBAO MARKETPLACE AS INDEPENDENT PLATFORMS JUHUASHUAN, A GROUP SHOPPING WEBSITE, BECOMES A SEPARATE BUSINESS FOCUS PLACE DIFFERENT BETS ON THE FUTURE OF E-COMMERCE…

If one is prepared to go through lessons in elementary economics, Basu rewards one with good stories Kaushik Basu normally lives a comfortable life teaching at Cornell University and advising World Bank. Between 2009 and 2012, he came to Delhi as Chief Economic Adviser (CEA) to the finance ministry, mostly under Pranab Mukherjee. ‘An Economist in the Real World’ is a memoir of his ministerial sojourn. People generally write memoirs towards the end of their lives, when they have time on their hands and want to tell someone how great they are, what great work they have done and what a great time they had. The best ones are as racy as a good novel, while the worst ones are chronicles of conceit. This memoir departs from the standard models.…

According to the United Nations World Population Prospects, India’s 60-plus population is expected to reach 323 million by 2050 – a number greater than the US population of 2012. And given the changing social landscape, moving away from joint family set-ups to nuclear families, making arrangements to support one’s sunset years is becoming increasingly important. However, building a nest egg has always taken a back seat for the Indian middle class, although most of them plan to catch up with the niceties of life post retirement. Says Sudipto Roy, Managing Director, Principal Retirement Advisors: “Pension policies are still a push product in India due to lack of awareness and expectations of individuals that their children will take care of them after retirement. This keeps them away from planning early.” GETTING…

How was the Budget for the insurance sector? There wasn’t anything hugely negative or anything that would make us go ‘wow’. There was some movement on the single premium annuity, which is nice. But it is not going to make a huge difference. It will not suddenly grow pensions in the industry. So it will not have much of an impact on pension incomes... My personal view is no. There will be some. Even before, it was some 3.09 per cent tax; so if you gave me a crore, it’s 3 lakh, which is a lot of money to give away straightaway. Reducing it takes away some of the constraint, but it’s not going to ignite the whole industry saying it is so much cheaper now, because there is still…

We gave the highest weightage to customer service and satisfaction As per the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority annual report, India is ranked 11 among 88 countries in the life insurance business. India’s share in the global life insurance market was 2.08 per cent in 2014. The share of non-life insurance premium was just 0.69 per cent; India ranked 20 among non-life insurance markets. In the first decade of insurance liberalisation, the sector reported a consistent increase in insurance penetration from 2.71 per cent in 2001 to 5.20 per cent in 2009. However, since then, it has been declining, and reached 3.3 per cent in 2014. We still are far from understanding and adopting the concept of insurance. To encourage insurers to keep serving the population at large, we decided…