Innholdsfortegnelse for 13 August 2017 i Business Today

BULL RUNS OVER THE YEARS The rally between May 2003 and January 2008 remains the mother of all bull runs NOT THERE YET The market cap-to-GDP ratio has risen over the past two years but is still way below the record high of 2008 DEMONETISATION IMPACT The BSE 500 market cap has crossed aggregate bank deposits. The gap would been much more without demonetisation FIIs ON SLOW TRACK This rally, unlike the past ones, has not seen big investments by foreign portfolio investors, which have invested ₹86,456 crore since February 2016…

F inance Minister Arun Jaitley put the spotlight on infrastructure in the last budget with a massive ₹3.96 lakh crore allocation for the sector. A signal to infrastructure companies that more projects are coming their way. But it does not translate into much joy for infrastructure conglomerates – the likes of GMR, GVK, Adani and Lanco – who, for over a decade following India’s economic reforms, had begun to look like the new face of Indian private enterprise with their assetowning developer model. Today, they are all sharply focused on internal housekeeping and dealing with the challenges of restructuring debt. Estimates show that the total debt by the four leading players – GMR, GVK, Adani and Lanco – alone will add up to close to ₹2 lakh crore. With such…

In 2000 and 2001, California in the US faced a power crisis. There were frequent blackouts during peak hours and shortage caused power prices to rise up to 20 times. This was despite the installed capacity of 45 GW being much higher than the demand of 28 GW. Later, it came to light that some energy traders, in collusion with Enron, were shutting down lines during peak hours to create artificial demand. This made a couple of large energy utilities bankrupt. This is now a case study on distortions in the power market. Observers of India’s power sector say there is a likelihood of a crisis here too. “Solar power will, in our view, put pressure on power prices and erode margins of generators, along the lines of what occurred…

At the rear of your smartphone is a tool that can do much more than click scenic landscapes and beautiful portraits. Be it refurbishing old documents into sharp PDFS, swiftly saving business cards into the phone’s contact list or being a personal translator on your travels abroad – the enhanced camera optics on the smartphone can do these and more, when bundled with easily available apps. To save yourself considerable time and effort, download the apps below and use the camera’s prowess to digitise your world. Scan with OCR: While it is easy to click a picture of a document and send it on mail or save it on the cloud, it’s not the most professional way. You don’t have to have a scanning device either. Scanning apps such as…

At a time when Donald Trump’s America grapples with building walls and withdrawing from the world, there has been a growing temptation for some to see China, the world’s secondlargest economy, as the next champion of the liberal global order. There can perhaps be no starker reality check – and one that should put paid to such notions – than the untimely death of Liu Xiaobo. On July 13, China’s most well-known dissident, writer and Nobel Laureate died from liver cancer in a hospital in Shenyang, a city in northeast China where he was serving a 11-year jail term for “inciting subversion of state power”. Liu was detained in 2008 over the circulation of Charter 08, an unprecedented pro-democracy call for reform signed by more than 300 Chinese intellectuals and…

A new trend is emerging. Hefty dividend payments by companies seem to be becoming unpopular. As per the data collated by Ace Equity for 382 companies whose details were available, 2016/17 saw the steepest decline – of 16 per cent compared to 2015/16 – in dividend payouts over the past decade. Around 45 per cent of these companies saw a decline in dividend payouts over the period – this despite over 20 per cent growth in their net profit and 6.4 per cent growth in the top line. Back in 2016, it was a different story. India Inc. (a bunch of BSE 500 companies) saw 7.4 per cent growth in dividend payments despite witnessing a 10.2 per cent reduction in profits. Dividend growth has outpaced growth in net profits over…

Just as corporate India is recuperating from the effects of demonetisation, the rollout of the goods and services tax (GST) has caused jitters. Corporate sentiment has dipped to its second-lowest level in the April-June period. The confidence level, on a scale of 100, slipped to 47.3 in the first quarter of 2017/18. In comparison, confidence level stood at 49.6 during January- March 2017 and 46.4 in October- December 2016, the lowest ever. The business confidence index (BCI) in the same quarter last year stood at 51.5. After a sharp fall at the end of last year, business confidence jumped in the first quarter of the calendar year 2017, giving an impression that businesses have shrugged off demonetisation fears. The current slump indicates that corporate leaders have turned pessimistic due to…

Uttar Pradesh Budget is pulling in two opposite directions – populism and austerity. On the one hand, there is the farm loan waiver, announced within days of the BJP government taking charge in March this year but whose precise cost to the exchequer – ₹36,359 crore – has been made clear only with the announcement of the government’s first Budget on July 11. But on the other hand, spending on a number of infrastructure and irrigation projects, some education schemes as well as schemes like the beautification of the Gomti riverside in Lucknow – a pet project of the previous government – has been slashed. There is no allocation even for continuing the muchpublicised free laptop distribution scheme of the previous government, though the BJP had promised, in its manifesto,…

In the April-June quarter of the current financial year (FY2017/18), the automotive sector in India was expected to bleed for two key reasons. First, a drop in prices was on the cards post the launch of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) on July 1 and buyers decided to stay away from the market till it happened. Second, auto dealers could not avail of input tax credit on stocks existing before July and, hence, companies were offering huge discounts, resulting in margin pressure. Short-term demand issues persisted. As per data from the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM), sales across the overall commercial vehicles segment declined by 9.1 per cent in the June quarter compared to the year-ago period while threewheeler sales stumbled by 24.75 per cent. However, sales in…

It was too fresh to forget. On October 12, 2014, as the cyclonic storm Hudhud slapped the port city of Visakhapatnam with wind speeds of over 185 km/hr, the terminal roof of the city’s airport came crashing down; the radar link of its cyclone warning centre collapsed; colonies were inundated; vehicles damaged. About 30 per cent of the city’s tree cover was lost. The state government estimated the damages at ₹21,908 crore. When a smart city awareness campaign kicked off in 2015 – through media announcements, cycle rallies, WhatsApp messaging, door-to-door surveys – citizens of Visakhapatnam picked climate resilience as one of the top priorities. And during the Urban Development Ministry’s Smart City Challenge, where aspiring cities competed for being selected as a ‘smart city’, Visakhapatnam specifically listed that its…

CAPACITY ADDITION IN 2012 30,000MW IN 2017 75,000MW FALLING DEMAND (ANNUAL) IN 2016/17 * 283GW BY 2022/23** 225GW *Based on 18th Electricity Power Survey **Based on 19th Electricity Power Survey For Indu Shekhar Jha, Chairman and Managing Director of the state-promoted transmission giant Power Grid Corporation of India (PGCIL), the priority lies in a different set of tasks. Unlike his predecessors, he is neither designing new projects nor struggling with congestion issues. Instead, he is working on boosting the country’s transmission capacity that will ensure seamless power flow from renewable energy sources. Known as the green energy corridor, this ₹43,000 crore project was envisaged in 2013 and involves grid extensions and upgrades for connecting renewable energy plants to the national grid. While new and upgraded transmission lines will resolve intermittency…

Since its inception in 2010, the design of the iPad has remained fairly unchanged. Apple did experiment with the display size by launching variants such as the Mini and Pro, while keeping the circular home button intact. The new 12.9- inch iPad Pro replaces the one launched in October 2015, and competes head on with Microsoft’s Surface range. The display is super bright –boasting 2,732 x 2,048 pixel resolution – and the device is sleek at 6.9-mm thickness. It is light – weighing 677 gm – and easily slides into a 13-inch laptop sleeve. Apple’s touch experience is unparalleled and now has been further enhanced with its ProMotion technology which is powered by a separate core in the iPad’s processor. The ProMotion technology delivers refresh rates of up to 120Hz…

The key objective of the scheme is to streamline fertiliser distribution and improve availability The government’s ambitious direct benefit transfer (DBT) programme for fertiliser subsidy may hit the skids as point-of-sale (POS) machines, required to carry out all such transactions for the sake of transparency, are in short supply. Close to 200,000 retail outlets across 11 states are supposed to receive these devices as a POS-only buy-and-sell regime is afoot and pilots for the same are under way in 14 districts for almost a year now. Under the new practice, retail outlets equipped with POS machines can read and record a buyer’s Aadhar/ID details. Once the validation is done, the subsidy amount is credited to the bank account of the manufacturer concerned. Before making any authenticated transaction, retailers must enter…

The Goods and Services Tax Network (GSTN), the IT infrastructure provider for GST, was supposed to take invoice uploading services live from July 16. It has deferred the plan to July 24. GSTN Chairman Navin Kumar says they were not very confident about the preparedness of GST Suvidha Providers, or GSPs, facilitators for uploading invoices/returns on the GSTN website. GSPs, however, say that GSTN has neither provided them updated APIs (Application Programme Interfaces) nor MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching), a technique to carry data from one network to another. While they admit that initial hiccups were expected due to the complexity and enormity of the job, they also say that GSTN does not have sufficient staff for such a big task. An executive of a GSP said on condition of anonymity…

The big, pale blue entrance gate of Ludhiana airport remains shut for most part of the day. It opens only when the airport staff comes to work or leaves in the evening. There’s hardly been any passenger movement over the last 30 months since Air India closed operations here. Once in a while, people come to board private chartered flights. Punjab Police personnel at the gate could barely write. When this was pointed out, the Director, A.N. Sharma, said the security staff will shortly undergo training in aviation safety that will prepare them for challenges after the airport starts functioning again from July-end, when it will kick off with scheduled flights from Alliance Air and Deccan Charters, thanks to the recent government push to regional air connectivity. In June 2016,…

The western borders of India are often considered the most sensitive territory that the armed forces have to guard against intrusion. And people like Rakesh Sharma, a former Inspector General of the Border Security Forces (BSF), Jammu Frontier, know it only too well, especially how arduous the task is and the chances of human errors slipping in. “There can be misjudgement in detection as it is difficult to keep a human being alert and active for day and night,” explains Sharma. To avoid such trip-ups, the BSF decided to deploy cutting-edge technology that would add an extra layer of protection in the surveillance system. The solution they wanted was a virtual wall that would alert troops about intrusion attempts and help them decide on further action in real time. So,…

Q. India remains Datsun’s largest market but the full potential is yet to be harnessed. Do you agree? Datsun is a challenger brand and we have been working hard to compete with established players for three years now. Datsun accounts for more than half of Nissan Motor’s total sales in India. We were the fastest-growing single brand in FY17 in India, ahead of well-established OEMS that have been active much longer than we have in this market. Q. How difficult is it to penetrate the Indian auto market? India is among the most challenging markets; if you succeed here, you can succeed anywhere. Customers expect good value proposition, stylish design and feature- rich cars. These characteristics make it a very challenging yet interesting market. Keeping this in mind, we decided…