Innholdsfortegnelse for 6-Sep-20 i Business Today

First it was exports. Around 2013, when the slowdown-induced economic nationalism and protectionism was taking roots, globalisation was slowly getting uprooted. India — forever a fringe player in global trade — bore the brunt of the de-coupling as merchandise exports began to flatten for the next seven years. With one major economic engine practically flat since 2013, India was still chugging along. Then, with domestic economy beginning to slow down, the second engine — private investment — started sputtering. Neither of these two major engine failures got undue attention as the economy continued to grow at a reasonably healthy 6 per cent plusrate, stillamong the fastest in the world, barring China. But the big blow came when the third engine of the economy — consumption — began slowing and eventually…

LACK OF JUDICIAL MEMBERS: AARs have two members, both technical. Lack of judicial members shows in quality of judgements LACK OF SENIORITY OF MEMBERS: Members are additional commissioner-level tax officers, too junior to man such an important tribunal PRO-REVENUE APPROACH: Since both members are from the tax department, the rulings are mostly pro-revenue CONTRADICTORY RULINGS: Since every state has an AAR, often authority from one state gives a ruling that is contradictory to the ruling given by the AAR of another state LACK OF APPEAL MECHANISM: Once the appellate tribunal of a state has pronounced a judgement, the taxpayer has no higher forum where he or she can appeal…

Banking and finance Brings efficiency, simplicity and transparency in operations; reduces transaction time from hours to seconds; automates inter-bank processes like trade finance and remittances; reduces use of paper at an industry level Governance Helps to track a large pile of data like land records or citizen’s records like birth certificates; eliminates need for reconciliation Telecom Helps share data for solving complaints of mobile number portability and unsolicited calls and messages; helps in standardisation and implementing transparency across the ecosystem Supply chain Helps asset tracking; eliminates data fraud; and eases supply chain finance…

FD laddering reduces the risk of the entire FD getting renewed at the lowest interest rate For a ladder of 5 years, investment amount is divided in five equal parts In the first year, five FDs of different tenure from 1 year to 5 years are booked For the next four years, one FD matures every year and gets rebooked for five years In the next five years, a FD ladder, or 5 FDs, for 5 years is created, which matures every year Interest earned can be used as regular income, while original amount is reinvested again…

Demand for power dropped in recent months and is likely to remain subdued. How will it impact the sector? The major dip was during the April lockdown. Now we are back. Energy is a function of demand from consumers, both households and industries. In the National Infrastructure Pipeline, power accounts for 20 per cent of investment during FY20-25. How has the progress been? If you look at capacity addition from 2014/15, in renewables alone, capacity addition and projects under implementation have been about 100GW. That entails investment in power generation alone of about ₹5 lakh crore. Then, we have thermal and hydro. Our capacity addition has been satisfactory. When we started off, we, in fact, had a power deficit. We did not generate enough power to meet demand. Today, our…

One bad apple spoils the entire basket,” says the founder of a Mumbai-based financial technology company that is into digital lending. This young start-up entrepreneur is talking about overambitious fintech players who are chasing unbanked customers without proper risk assessment just to gain volumes and resorting to unethical collection and recovery practices. He gives an example of a Gurgaon-based fintech company they were planning to buy a year ago and which they found was accessing borrowers’ contact details at the time of onboarding through its app. “People, when they need money, give permission to apps that seek access to contacts, SMSes, location,” he says. The company was using these details for loan recovery by calling up borrowers’ friends and family members. When the start-up founder questioned the company executives saying…

Indians love anything that’s free. The number of cashbacks, extended promotional offers and discounting by start-ups bear testimony to this. Online gaming, too, is no exception — most games are free-to-play mobile applications, part of subscriptions (bundled offering by telecom operators to existing subscribers), gaming events and streaming e-sports. Subscription revenues, therefore, are way lower as a percentage of advertising revenues in India. Revenue Models Globally, online gaming is a $150-billion industry with nearly two billion users across all forms. The gamers use mobile devices, personal computers or gaming consoles — Xbox, PlayStation and others. Games on these platforms are either real money games (RMG), e-sports (tournament games) or casual games played on different mobile devices. “IN THE LAST FOUR YEARS, INDIA HAS BUILT CAPABILITIES AROUND GAMING TECHNOLOGIES IN MOST…

DCB Bank: The challenge was to verify tax certificates issued by the tax department and authenticate tax returns without compromising privacy. The bank decided to go for a blockchain-based solution to avail a single version of data for all stakeholders. The bank gets a consolidated summary of an individual’s transactions across financial institutions and provides a single view of certificates to the tax assessing officer. This also allows the bank to lend with more confidently as income related information provided by taxpayers is authenticated instantly. The blockchain solution helps in corporate lending as well since online approval comes in real-time from tax authorities for mortgaged properties. Walmart: The retail giant has a blockchain pilot for end-to-end traceability of shrimp sourced from Andhra Pradesh and shipped to the US. It helps…

Mayank Kachhwaha, Co-Founder and COO, IndiaLends, has been passionate about music since childhood, but gave his heart and soul to it during his four years in college. “Belonging to a small town, I couldn’t find a teacher during school days, but just when I cleared JEE and went to IIT Madras, I volunteered to become part of various college bands and learned guitar all by myself with the help of my trained friends. My understanding of music is entirely based on guitar.” Kachhwaha now has his own band, The Dry Days, which has four original tracks to its credit. He is the lead guitarist and vocalist. “After college I had stopped accepting gigs, but continued practicing at home. I created my own home studio. Only last year we recorded these…

“We want our old position back. That is the target, else we would not be making this comeback.”Rahul Sharma, Co-founder, Micromax Informatics Micromax Co-founder Rahul Sharma is not superstitious. But when he re-focussed his attention on the struggling consumer electronics firm, one of the decisions was to go back to the company’s old office in Udyog Vihar Phase V in Gurgaon. Earlier, when the going was good, Micromax had shifted base barely a kilometre away to a bigger office in the adjacent Phase IV. Going back to the same building where it started its journey in smartphones more than a decade ago and where it scaled dizzying heights, is symbolic of what the company is aiming to do ahead — script the same success story all over again. “We want…

Retirement years are meant to be stress free. But managing retirement incomes may not be so. One has to keep in mind various challenges that could crop up in such times of crisis like the one we are witnessing. It presents a dual challenge – preventing one’s regular income from falling, and making sure that any health emergency does not erode a significant part of the retirement corpus. There are plenty of investment options available, but since most of them involve a fair amount of equity exposure, most senior citizens prefer to stay away, given the kind of corrections seen recently. Where are interest rates headed? The level of interest rate is the biggest factor that determines the return on investment and the amount of regular income that a senior…

For a seasoned lawyer like Sridhar Gorthi, Founder and Managing Partner of law firm Trilegal, learning from the law of nature has been a humbling experience. A few years ago, Gorthi acquired some land in Raigad district of Maharashtra, with plans of building a fruit orchard. But, he soon realised the land was not suited for an orchard. “The land was very flat and hard-packed. When I asked, I was told that this land had been historically used to grow paddy. The area received plenty of rain and the conditions were ideal for paddy farming.” It was then that Gorthi realised he had approached farming with the urban notion that the best use of land was to grow fruits or cash crops, without considering what local farmers had been doing…

As millions of Indians have been working from home for well over four months, the big challenge is to ensure robust broadband connectivity at all times. Considering that broadband traffic has shifted from business districts in cities to residential areas, providing high-speed connectivity is definitely a challenge. Addressing a virtual roundtable organised by Business Today on ‘Leapfrogging Digital Infrastructure’, K Ramchand, Member (Technology), Department of Telecommunications (DoT) stated that work is on to ensure improved broadband connectivity across the country. To cater to that, DoT is coming up with multiple policies. That includes a new spectrum policy, a new work-from-home (WFH) policy and encouraging internet service providers (ISPs) and telecom service providers to install millions of miniature Wi-Fi hotspots across the country. Ramchand said DoT is working to ensure that…