Innholdsfortegnelse for 17 April 2022 i Business Today

When the Tata group acquired ailing national carrier Air India last year, it was a seminal moment not just for privatisation in India but also for the Indian aviation industry. Here was one of the country’s largest and storied business groups acquiring an airline that would, together with the existing airlines Tata owns—Vistara and AirAsia India—make it a formidable force in the Indian aviation market. The acquisition also paves the way for a bruising battle for market share between the Tata group and India’s biggest airline company, IndiGo, at a time when the Indian skies are set to witness the entry of at least one new player, Akasa Air, funded by star investor Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, and the revival of the fallen Jet Airways, which is now controlled by the Kalrock-Jalan…

OIL & GAS MINISTER Hardeep Singh Puri must be partially relieved after state-owned oil marketing firms raised fuel prices for the first time in four months. Crude oil prices have steadily risen since the start of Russian military action in Ukraine, eroding the margins of players like IOCL, HPCL and BPCL. The 70-year-old former diplomat also told the Rajya Sabha that he was weighing in on potential investment opportunities in Russian oil and gas assets if western oil majors exited the country.…

BY REAPPOINTING Jawahar Goel as MD till March 2025, Dish TV’s board has sent a clear message that it is in no mood to relent to pressure from its largest shareholder YES Bank to replace Goel—Subhash Chandra’s brother; he has 5.93 per cent promoter shareholding in the company—and four directors. This comes after the reappointment of non-executive and non-independent director Ashok Kurien was shot down at its AGM. What next for the company?…

AFTER FAILING TO REVIVE the business for years, the Kolkata-based Khaitan family may finally have to part ways with Eveready Industries, the maker of eponymous batteries that are pretty much ubiquitous in India, and which once used to be the crown jewel for the diversified group. With the Competition Commission of India clearing the takeover bid by the Burman family, the beleaguered dry cell battery maker is now closer to having a new owner. The Delhi-based Burman family, which already has interests across fast moving consumer goods (FMCG), quick service restaurant chains and financial services, has lined up five group companies and a financial advisory firm to take control of Eveready. While the Burmans already own 19.85 per cent of the company, three of their group entities Puran Associates Private…

1 Domestic passenger traffic continued to recover with 7.7 million people travelling in February compared to 6.4 million in January, a rise of 20 per cent 2 Regional routes connecting Tier II and III cities are said to be the new engines of growth 3 But rising ATF prices continue to worry airline operators; ATF contributes up to 45 per cent of total operating costs 4 The high fuel costs and losses suffered since March 2020 may prevent airlines from offering deep discounts on fares 5 A strong framework is needed to prevent the rise of monopolies that may scuttle new companies from emerging…

₹24‚713 CRORE SIZE OF THE RELIANCE RETAIL-FUTURE GROUP DEAL ₹17‚000 CRORE AMOUNT OWED BY FUTURE GROUP TO LENDING BANKS AT AROUND NOON ON A pleasant day this February, a harried executive of a mall in Amritsar called his CEO. Much as he tried to hold his emotions together, the situation got the better of him. Standing in front of him was a team from Reliance Projects & Property Management Services, a part of the Mukesh Ambani-controlled Reliance conglomerate, who, by contrast, was composed but also displayed some level of urgency to wrap up some paperwork. “They were holding the termination letter and also a new agreement letter,” narrates the CEO, who was pulled out of a meeting by his team member. The offer was quite irresistible—all the outstanding rental payments…

➨ HPCaaS market is $4.5 billion globally and expected to double to $9 billion by 2025 ➨ HPCaaS in India is expected to grow to around $102 million by 2025 from $47 million in 2020 ➨ In 2020, the overall HPC server market globally was $13.5 billion. In 2025, this is expected to climb to $20 billion ➨ Globally on-premise HPC market to reach $40 billion with add-on storage, middleware, applications, and maintenance services Source: Hyperion Research…

THIRTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD advertising professional Nandini Dhingra is a self-confessed ‘cheese-aholic’. “I can have cheese any time of day and night,” says the Bengaluru resident. Her current favourite cheese is called Ode to Chennai—a young Cheddar rubbed with milagai podi (gunpowder). The unusual cheese is the brainchild of artisanal cheese maker Namrata Sundaresan who along with her partner Anuradha Krishnamoorthy founded Käse in Chennai in 2016. Käse does a variety of cheeses with a desi twist such as a Pecorino (an Italian sheep-milk cheese) infused with fennel, or a goat cheese that is wrapped in fresh turmeric leaves and then aged for a couple of weeks. “In India we have a very good understanding of spices. So why shouldn’t we use it,” says Sundaresan who gave up a 13-year-long corporate career to…

PVR INOX, the merged entity born from PVR Ltd’s merger with second largest multiplex chain INOX Leisure, will be the largest film exhibition company in India with 1,546 screens in 109 cities, pushing Carnival with 450-plus screens to a distant second. The new entity will hold 40-45 per cent of India’s multiplex revenues, bringing it into the crosshairs of the Competition Commission of India. But with revenues less than ₹1,000 crore, the CCI’s threshold for exemption, it might just pass muster.…

The Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) has reduced the interest rate on provident fund deposits to 8.1 per cent for 2021-22, the lowest in 40 years—it was at 8 per cent in 1977-78. The decline in rates will hit 60 million subscribers of EPFO. Will the interest rates for other small savings schemes also be slashed? Rates do tend to change in tandem. Sukanya Samriddhi Account has an interest rate of 7.6 per cent, Senior Citizens Savings Scheme has 7.4 per cent, and Public Provident Fund (PPF) 7.1 per cent.…

Baba Ramdev has an opinion on practically all things, and these days, especially on matters FMCG. The trait was on full display when he faced media queries during the launch of Ruchi Soya’s follow-on public offering (FPO). Asked about the recently-listed Adani Wilmar, Ramdev was quick to say that Adani Wilmar is just an oil company while Ruchi Soya has a strong presence in FMCG, food and nutraceuticals. Wherever there is a yogi, everything is possible, he quipped. Baba Ramdev has called Adani Wilmar just an oil company, while explaining that Ruchi Soya is present in FMCG, food and nutraceuticals…

Airline stocks have displayed a mixed trend in FY22. With a rally of 20 per cent since April 1, 2021, shares of Inter-Globe Aviation (IndiGo) jumped to ₹1,962.85 on March 28, 2022. On the other hand, Jet Airways (India) and SpiceJet declined 10.27 per cent and 18.92 per cent, respectively, during the same period. Meanwhile, the benchmark BSE Sensex has advanced 16.33 per cent in FY22 so far. These same stocks had delivered handsome returns to investors in FY21, on the back of robust liquidity in the market. Jet Airways, SpiceJet and InterGlobe had surged 600 per cent, 88 per cent and 53 per cent, respectively, in FY21, while the 30-share Sensex gained 68 per cent during the period.…

1 Digital payments are growing by leaps and bounds, with millennials increasingly using such modes 2 New form of private money linked to US dollar are very popular 3 CBDC to counter cryptos and other private digital currencies 4 Digital rupee to replace cash in the economy with digital currency and discourage cryptos 5 More innovations to take place on top of CBDC 6 CBDC to lead to huge savings, reduce wastage and make the monetary system more efficient 7 Digital rupee will lead to better economic management with end-use records of money transactions; also help in tax compliance…

POPULAR CHOICE VENTURE DEBT HAS BECOME A FAVOURITE ALTERNATIVE SOURCE OF CAPITAL WITH FOUNDERS VENTURE DEBT. Isn’t that an oxymoron? While venture signifies high risk, debt signifies the opposite. But start-up founders seem to love venture debt. In fact, it is fast becoming a multi-purpose tool that founders deploy at the heart of their growth strategy. It also means that venture debt funds are able to deploy more capital, faster. Investors, too, seem to be enamoured by venture debt, if fundraising is anything to go by. The pace at which India’s top venture debt firms are closing their fundraising tells the story of this asset class, and its blistering growth. Take for instance Alteria Capital, which has companies such as Dunzo, Country Delight and Rebel Foods in its portfolio. Launched…

CHENNAI-HEADQUARTERED automobile major TVS Motor Company uses high-performance computing (HPC) for running R&D simulations and testing the aero-dynamics of two-wheelers, which allows it to make the vehicles stable at speed and more efficient, cool engines faster, and achieve better top speeds, quicker. It has been doing this for, like, forever, but something changed in 2020. Earlier, TVS would purchase HPC hardware upfront for five-year periods, to be installed, run and maintained by its own team. As Ranjith Radhakrishnan K.C., AVP-IT, TVS Motor Company, informs us, in this ‘capex’ model, “we had to actually pay upfront for five years, and when we revised something, we had to make sure that it lasted five years”. In 2020, TVS switched to HPE GreenLake’s HPC-as-a-Service (HPCaaS), an ‘opex’ model perched on its premise. Ergo,…

Most Economical plan ₹11,000 per month Compute power: 4 vCPU, 20 GB RAM, 8 GB NVIDIA V100 Tensor Core GPUs, 250 GB DISK, vNIC and up to 10G Network performance with Unlimited Data Transfer and Host Anti-Virus Most Premium plan ₹1.74 lakh per month Compute power: 2 x Intel Xeon Gold 6230 2.1GHz, 20C, 12x64 (768) GB RAM, 2×480 GB HDD, 4x10G & 2x1G NIC, 4 x NVIDIA V100 Tensor Core GPUs 32GB and full height GPU with 36 months Pro Support On-prem setup An on-premise setup with tech specs comparable to the “most economical plan” above could cost an organisation upwards of ₹50 lakh. There will also be additional cost factors like power, cooling, network, manpower and software licences Source: Yotta…

COLLECTIBLES A limited set of NFT art, items, or cards with varying attributes and scarcity. Collectibles are popular partly due to standard attributes across a collection, enabling rarity in valuation models. NFT ART Digital content including images, music and videos. Sometimes there is a physical item accompanying the NFT, but this is not necessary. METAVERSE A network of virtual environments in which people can interact with each other, digital objects, and the physical world through their avatars. Virtual land purchases in metaverse platforms attract some of the highest valuations. SPORTS NFTs are used to represent sports collectibles, community participation rights and event ticketing. Many of the collectibles represent highlight moments from games that users can trade, similar to physical sports trading cards. GAMING Gaming NFTs represent in-game assets such as…

What was the problem you were grappling with? When I started my career there were very few women in banking. When I went into meetings, people would not shake my hand or make eye contact. They would look at the male colleagues on my team instead, making me feel like I was talking to the wall. I often stopped my discussion midway and redirected the conversation back to my male colleagues, worried that we would not be taken credibly if I were seen as the lead banker from our end. Who did you approach and why? I asked my father, a career banker, for advice. He said the men I was meeting in the corporate world were facing a paradigm shift. They were not used to discussing finance and strategy…

The Indian stock market is proving to be a resilient one if one looks at the correlation between the fall in the Nifty—or even the broader indices—and selling by foreign portfolio investors (FPIs). An analysis by ICICI Securities shows FPIs sold over $36 billion in the past one year—more than the $28 billion during the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Yet, the indices dipped around 15-20 per cent, compared to 70 per cent in 2008. Reason: strong inflows from domestic institutional investors.…

HE HAS BEEN amply exposed to both full-service and low-cost formats of the airline industry, has first-hand knowledge of all the business functions, and has served in important markets in Southeast Asia, Europe and the Middle-East. Meet Vinod Kannan, the young CEO of full-service carrier Vistara, a 51:49 joint venture between Tata Sons and Singapore Airlines. Elevated to the role in the New Year, Kannan, who is in his early forties and joined Singapore Airlines in 2001, throws light on his strategy for Vistara amid the recovery in passenger traffic in a post-Covid-19 world and the current geopolitical uncertainties. Edited excerpts: Where is the place for a full-service carrier in the Indian market? Not just in terms of positioning, but also in terms of the slots since it’s just you…

1 People at bottom of the pyramid are not very financially literate 2 CBDC faces competition from existing mobile wallets like Google Pay; value proposition would matter 3 The cash economy is still strong despite demonetisation and digitisation 4 Small countries have implemented CBDCs but big ones like the US and China are still to take the plunge 5 Broadband access and 24-hour internet connectivity are pain points 6 Any incentive by way of interest rate on CBDC to impact broad money; monetary policy to get impacted…

YOU HAVE PROBABLY heard of Dolo 650. The antipyretic—a medicine used to treat fever and body ache—was in high demand in January 2022, cornering sales of ₹51.79 crore or about 23.4 million strips, as per Pharmasoft-tech AWACS, a pharma market research company. Comparatively, in January 2021, sales were ₹18 crore. In the 12-month period of January to December 2021 Dolo 650 clocked sales of ₹417 crore (about 189.4 million strips) as per AWACS. Thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, almost every household today is aware of the drug. Manufactured by Micro Labs, Dolo 650 was the most prescribed antipyretic during the third wave of Covid-19. “Whenever there has been outbreak of viral infections, Dolo 650 has seen spike in prescriptions and sales. Going by our past experience during the outbreaks of…

Tata Elxsi using Azure HPC capabilities to run customer simulations Academic institutes leveraging 100,000 free hours of HP-CaaS by NxtGen Datacenter & Cloud Technologies Orbo.ai using HP-CaaS for extensive AI training over huge image and video datasets CARE Ratings using Yotta HPCaaS for data analytics projects to develop sentiment analysis and predictive models for its ratings business TVS Motor using HPE GreenLake HPCaaS on-prem for testing the aerodynamics of two-wheelers…

➨ BFSI: Load approval, detecting abnormalities and intrusion attempts in real time ➨ Healthcare: Computational power can help process acceleration and reduce discovery time in research and drug discovery ➨ Smart Energy Grids: Can provide enormous computing power to optimise and maintain energy efficiency in real time ➨ Manufacturing: Can help in quickly analysing data and provide autonomous capability ➨ Education: Help in research and innovation…

1 SET UP ONLINE WALLET Platforms such as NFTically allow MetaMask or any Ethereum-based wallet using WalletConnect 2 CREATE STORE Navigate to ‘create store’ toggle on the website to be redirected to your dashboard and set up your own store 3 LIST ON THE MARKETPLACE Customise the store according to your preference, give it a name and list it on the marketplace 4 MAKE YOUR OWN COLLECTION Choose any digital token to upload and mint. Provide name and description. Then set price and post your listing 5 SELL YOUR NFT As you hit the create button, the token gets its own smart contract and is sent to the blockchain free of charge. Pay the transactional fee, called gas fee, for minting your digital token. Your collection now becomes available on the marketplace for anyone…

POWERED BY CRYPTO, CRYPTO, CRYPTO… the craze is all around us. This craze is matched only by the obscurity and worry that accompanies this new ‘asset’. So, when Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology, calmly announced that everyone is free to invest in crypto assets through an RBI mechanism, the sigh of relief was palpable. “The Liberalised Remittance Scheme (LRS) is the easiest way for an individual to invest in any asset he or she wants. And there is no disqualification from anybody owning a crypto asset as part of his portfolio of assets.” This was probably the high point of the Business Today Crypto Conclave, which witnessed a series of stimulating debates around crypto assets on a pleasant March day at The Oberoi in New…