Innholdsfortegnelse for 16-May-21 i Business Today

April-June 2021 was supposed to be the quarter of redemption. A quarter of ‘Hope’ that was to herald India’s great economic recovery after Budget 2021 finally acted on reviving consumption in the economy with an unprecedented infrastructure push. Centre pumped in `4.39 lakh crore into infrastructure in FY21 to trigger a public investment-led push to perk up demand, racking up a fiscal deficit of 9.5 per cent in the last fiscal. Despite that, right at the beginning of this fiscal, it is amply clear that FY22 cannot bank on this quarter for better times ahead. In fact, April-June, 2021 could well go down in history as the quarter that stalled the recovery. As unsuspecting Central and state governments wound up the massive emergency Covid-care hospitals across the country in January…

At 8:05 PM on April 20, the Twitter handle of the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) announced that PM Narendra Modi will address the nation on the Covid-19 situation in the next 40 minutes. The PMO tweet put the entire country on listening mode since Modi has made disruptive announcements at short notice — demonetisation was declared overnight and national lockdown against Covid-19 last year happened within four hours of the announcement. Thankfully, a hard lockdown was not even an option this time round. The one emphatic message the Prime Minister conveyed was, “Lockdowns should be used as a last resort. States should focus on micro-containment zones. We have to save the country from lockdown”. There was a reason why he urged state governments to instil confidence among migrants that their…

When the country went into a nationwide lockdown last year to fight the first wave of Covid, the worst hit were micro, small and medium entrepreneurs (MSME). Just when these MSMEs thought business was picking up, the second wave hit them hard. For example, the Thane-Belapur-Bhiwandi belt in Mumbai has over 1,200 small and medium engineering units. Post lockdown last year, many of them started getting orders for industrial vessels, boilers and drums. They also got lucrative subcontracts to supply to defence industry manufacturers. Migrant workers, who had gone back to their villages, had returned and business was finally turning around. But, the entire situation has taken a U-turn with the onset of the new Coronavirus wave. "In the past couple of weeks, almost all the engineering units have closed…

As of India Inc’s January-March quarter results for FY21 trickle in, early birds bring good tidings of robust earnings momentum. Companies look set for a strong show in Q4 on a low base in the previous fiscal. How-ever, the recent surge in infections and sporadic curbs by states could prove to be a dampener for the earnings story in FY22. IT bellwether Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) kicked off the fourth-quarter earnings season on April 12 with a 14.9 per cent year-on-year growth in consolidated net profit and a 9.4 per cent increase in topline. Infosys and Wipro followed with double-digit growths in consolidated profits at 17.5 per cent and 27.7 per cent, respectively, and 13.1 per cent and 3.4 per cent increase in revenues. These numbers could be the harbinger…

↘ December-quarter numbers show normalisation of trade after lifting of the lockdown. The earlier surpluses were driven by a sharp dip in imports ↘ The current account deficit in Q3 2020 was also mainly due to a rise in trade deficit to $34.5 billion, from $14.8 billion in the preceding quarter Source: RBI India’s current account slipped back into deficit ($1.7 billion) in October-December 2020 after a gap of three quarters $584.4 MILLION Current account surplus in the March 2020 quarter. It rose further to a record high of $19 billion in the June 2020 quarter, before pulling back a little to $15.1 billion in the September 2020 quarter…

When Mumbai-based homemaker Van-dana Mathur called her neighbourhood grocer to order essentials such as rice, oil and atta last week, she was told they were out of stock. Though the grocer assured her he would deliver the products at her doorstep by afternoon, Gupta was worried. “I started to wonder whether we were in for another round of lockdown-related supply crunch,” she says. Later in the afternoon, Mathur’s grocer did deliver her order as promised, but also warned her to be prepared for delays since supplies were taking longer than usual ever since Maharashtra announced a lockdown to break the chain of Covid-19 infections. The second wave of Covid-19 is spreading like wildfire, forcing state governments to impose mini lockdowns. Like last year, retail (barring essentials) has already come to…

C.K. Venkataraman, 60, the new Managing Director of Titan Com-pany — who cycles to office every day and is a regular marathoner — thinks that age is just a number. He loves to sing and has many a times unknowingly entertained his co-passengers on flights as he hummed (loud enough for others to hear) while lis-tening to old Bollywood classics. Venkatraman’s friendly demeanor is probably something that is best suited for the ₹20,000-crore lifestyle major, which is trying hard to break out of its legacy image. The company’s biggest challenge today is to resonate with the as-pirational Indian millennial, who account for close to 65 per cent of the country’s population. Though Titan is the most loved and respected, it is not considered aspirational enough. A 25-year-old prospective bride may…

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GM, a leading switches and home electrical company in India has introduced revolutionary products like new generation Switches, Home automations, LED lights, Fans, Bluetooth music players and much more with the aim to provide the best of design and comfort in every home. As market leaders in switches and other home accessories, GM is at the forefront of innovation. G-Bus - a one-of-a-kind home automation system transforms living spaces with internet-connected devices to enable the remote monitoring and management of appliances and systems, such as lighting, blinds and shutters, temperature, security, music and more. It provides home owners security, comfort, convenience and energy efficiency by allowing them to control smart devices, with an app. GM product suite ranges from wires and cables to LED lights, switches and complete home automation…

At a time when government finances have been hit due to Covid-19, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman intro-duced a new mechanism of revenue mobilisation in Budget 2021—asset monetisation. It aims to unlock value from public assets and tap the private sector to fund infrastruc-ture projects. “Monetising operating public infrastructure assets is an important financing option for new infrastructure construction,” Sitharaman said in her Budget speech. A National Monetisation Pipeline of potential brownfield infrastructure assets was announced, along with a dash-board to track the progress of identified projects. Opera-tions and maintenance of dedicated freight corridor proj-ects of Indian Railways, highway projects of the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI), airports in Tier-II and III cities, oil and gas pipelines of Gas Authority of In-dia Ltd (GAIL), Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ltd (HPCL) and…

Hiking trips are generally for the adventurous, but for Dr. Om Manchanda, Managing Director, Dr Lal PathLabs, they are more of a spiritual experience. “I love to feel and hear the sound of nature. I go to mountains to bask in the glory of scenic places. There is something about landscapes at high latitudes… it feels blissful being there,” he says. Manchanda’s first hiking tour was as a 17-year-old to Milam Glacier, in the Kumaon Himalayas in Uttarakhand, in 1982. “I was a member of the college’s mountaineering club,” he says. After a long break, he revived his passion around 10 years ago, and has been on a hiking trip every year since then. “I love to hike on the Alps. I have been to Italy, Slovenia, Scotland and lot…