Innholdsfortegnelse for 27 November 2022 i Business Today

KEEPING WITH THE deadline of 2023, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) commenced its pilot project on November 1, 2022 for launching the digital rupee, more popularly known as Central Bank Digital Currency, or CBDC. The first pilot is in the wholesale segment. The use case is the settlement of secondary market transactions in government securities, which recorded a total value of ₹275 crore on the first day. The retail segment is planned for launch within a month in select locations in closed user groups. Currently, only nine banks have been identified for participation in the pilot. The CBDC’s pilots will be closely watched for their efficacy and efficiency.…

AFTER MUCH ADO, Elon Musk is the official owner of Twitter. The Tesla chief, who first disclosed his 9.2 per cent Twitter shareholding in April, later going on to make a hostile bid for the social network, closed his $44-billion buyout just a day before a Delaware Chancery Court-ordered deadline of October 29. Before taking office, Musk tweeted: “The bird is freed”. His tenure as Twitter’s new CEO (or what he calls “Chief Twit”) began with the firings of incumbent CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, and the company’s legal affairs and policy chief Vijaya Gadde, who’s infamous for issuing former US President Donald Trump a lifetime ban. Twitter Chairman Bret Taylor has also exited the firm. Back in April, before things soured between Agrawal and Musk, the former had…

IN INDIA, IT is common to place calls over messaging apps in places with patchy cellular networks. But does that mean that over-the-top (OTT) messaging services like WhatsApp and Signal can be considered telecom service providers? The recently introduced draft Indian Telecommunications Bill, 2022, seems to think so. The Bill has placed OTT communication services like WhatsApp, Signal, and Facebook, internet and broadband companies, and even in-flight communication services under the umbrella of ‘telecom services’. The government is expected to release a second draft of the Bill after receiving feedback from stakeholders. Telecom operators like Bharti Airtel, Reliance Jio, and Vodafone Idea have been pushing for regulation of OTT communication apps. The Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) says uniform regulations should be adopted for all OTT players, including communication…

INVEST INDIA, THE country’s investment promotion agency, acts as a catalyst for foreign direct investment (FDI) into India. Its recent successes have led to the World Bank creating a case study on it, says Deepak Bagla, MD & CEO of Invest India. The agency also has additional responsibility of Startup India and the Prime Minister’s science and technology initiative. Bagla, who has had stints with the World Bank and Citibank and is the current President of the World Association of Investment Promotion Agencies (WAIPA), speaks on a range of issues in an interaction with BT. Edited excerpts: What are the significant highlights of Invest India in the past few years? The most interesting thing, and it’s ironic, is that starting up a business in India was complex for foreign investors,…

THE UNSUSTAINABLE level of debt on India’s states is the talk of the town again. A recent report where the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) pulled up state governments for their rising debt levels has heated up the debate between the central and state governments on fiscal responsibility. The RBI commented in its report: “The fiscal condition among states in India is showing warning signs of building stress.” Prompted by the recent crisis that had engulfed the Sri Lankan economy, the RBI’s assessment found that, “For the five most indebted states, the debt is no longer sustainable, as the debt growth has outpaced their gross state domestic product (GSDP) growth in the last five years.” Based on the debt-to-GSDP ratio in 2020-21, the report named Punjab, Rajasthan, Kerala, West Bengal,…

VICTOR HUGO of Les Miserables fame described cognac as ‘the liquor of the gods’. So what makes the amber liquid so special to be given such an exalted status? “Cognac is distilled white wine which is then aged for years. Sometimes for decades, as is the case for Louis XIII. It comes only from the Cognac region in Southwest France,” says Malo Le Mestre, Brand Ambassador in India for Louis XIII, one of the world’s most exclusive cognac brands. The history of cognac stretches back to the 1600s. The story goes that it was the Dutch who wanted to carry wine from France to the Netherlands. But it did not travel well. So they decided to distil it. At first it was distilled only once, probably to keep it as…

For 43-year-old Ambika Sharma, the Founder and MD of Pulp Strategy, a digital communications and marketing agency, her love for biking started when she was just 12-years old. Her father, a retired army officer, loved his Royal Enfield and inculcated that love in his young daughter. She got her first bike—another Royal Enfield—when she was in college in Delhi in the late 1990s. At that time, not too many women rode bikes. The BBC programme Wheels wanted someone to test ride their bikes and Sharma got that as a freelance gig. “That got me an opportunity to ride every two-wheeler that was coming into the market, adding to my love for bikes,” says Sharma. She retained her trusted Royal Enfield right through college and work, and when she was finally…

SOURCE CAIT, FADA, MEDIA REPORTS ₹19,500 CRORE Worth of gold (39 tonnes) sold in just two days on the occasion of Dhanteras this year, which is 30 per cent higher than last year 539,227 UNITS Number of vehicles sold by automobile companies during Navratri this year, a growth of 57 per cent YoY 27 PER CENT The growth online marketplaces witnessed during the festive season sales between September 22 and 30, hitting the $5.7-billion mark…

ONCE THE GROWTH driver for the country’s consumer goods majors, the rural market has turned into their Achilles heel since the Covid-19 pandemic. From double-digit growth in pre-Covid-19 years, volume offtake in the hinterlands have turned negative in recent quarters. Volume sales of FMCG products in rural India have shrunk by 9 per cent—dragging the overall market by 6 per cent—between October 2021 and September 2022, as per Nielsen data. The faltering growth of consumer goods companies in India’s small towns and villages points to the impact of steep inflation on rural household budgets.…

Following a string of flops in Bollywood, multiplex operators are now banking on reruns of old Hindi films to get audiences back to the theatres. On the occasion of Shah Rukh Khan’s birthday on November 2, PVR, INOX Movies and Cinépolis ran the superstar’s blockbuster Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge on their screens. Ditto Amitabh Bachchan’s 80th birthday, when the multiplexes brought back the megastar’s cult films like Deewar, Don, Namak Halal, and Amar Akbar Anthony, and still saw full houses almost half a century after their release.…

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The banking and financial services (BFS) industry is being fundamentally re-shaped in terms of purpose, players, technology and stakeholder expectations - while facing increasing “financialisation” of the economy, challenging geopolitical environment, and non-traditional and competition. This is creating a massive demand for a wide range of skills - in traditional areas like risk management and banking operations as well as newer areas including wealth management, alternative assets, pensions, technology, data analytics, ML, information security, ESG, and regulatory change. These are not optional skills, nor is “familiarity” adequate - these are core skills to be mastered. It is also critical to be a lifelong learner, to stay relevant in a rapidly changing ecosystem. The PGDM BFS program at IMT Ghaziabad - a two-year journey combining the learning from a traditional PGDM…

A FEW YEARS ago, the CEO of a multinational company (MNC) flew down to experience India’s ‘friendly’ business climate. The honcho ended up standing for hours at the jam-packed immigration desk at the airport. Some months later, when the CEO visited Vietnam, another competing destination for foreign investors, the President of the South-East Asian country rushed to the airport to welcome him. These are small, soft things; yet they matter. Things seem to be changing after Invest India, the country’s investment promotion agency (IPA) which is a one-stop shop for foreign investors, was set up and empowered. Recently, the Invest India team went to receive a global CEO where the aircraft touched down. It’s another story that the team had to speak to multiple departments to get clearances. “Costs are…

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1 Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had announced the plan to set up an expert committee to look into the issues plaguing PE/VC funding in India in her Budget speech on February 1, 2022 2 The committee is tasked with suggesting reforms to improve the venture capital ecosystem in India and recommend ways to scale up PE/VC investments as well 3 The investor community hopes that the committee will help in creating a level playing field for Indian and international funds 4 The committee will likely present a set of recommendations to the finance ministry before deliberations begin for the FY24 Union Budget…

What was the problem you were grappling with? It is a common belief in the start-up ecosystem that burning cash is the only way for fintechs to get customers on board. And a popular narrative is that consumer fintechs cannot turn profitable. The key stakeholders, including the investors, believe in this narrative. Whom did you approach for advice? To change this perception, especially about consumer-facing payments firms, it required a complete buy-in from the core team and the tying in of individual goals with the company’s vision. In 2019, I discussed this with my core team during an offsite and together we decided to be the front-runners in demonstrating that consumer fintech in India can scale and be profitable at the same time. What was the advice you received? The…

While laying the foundation stone of the C-295 transport aircraft manufacturing facility in Gujarat’s Vadodara district, PM Narendra Modi said it had the potential to transform the country’s aerospace and defence sectors. “I can see a time when some of the biggest passenger aircraft are also manufactured in India. And they will be carrying the words ‘Made in India’,” he declared. Once operational, the Tata Advanced Systems and Airbus Defence and Space’s ₹22,000-crore JV will be the first private sector entity in both sectors. The first of the 40 Made in India aircraft is expected to roll out in H2 of 2026. The C-295 can take off or land on short or unprepared airstrips.…

In a ruling that could have repercussions for companies that fail to clear employees’ dues after shutting operations, the NCLAT has held that the resolution plan of the Jalan-Kalrock Consortium for Jet Airways went against the Employees Provident Fund Act, 1952. The two-member NCLAT bench observed that the plan failed to provide for payment of provident fund and gratuity to the airline staff. Several employees termed the judgment as the best Diwali gift since the airline folded up in April 2019.…

IT WAS A development in the works ever since salt-to-software conglomerate the Tata group took over national flag carrier Air India in January. In a filing with Malaysian stock exchange Bursa Malaysia in early November, AirAsia’s holding company Capital A Berhad—formerly AirAsia Group Berhad—said it had agreed to sell its 16.33 per cent stake in AirAsia India to Air India for $18.83 million. “Covid-19 has allowed us to re-examine our priorities, and we felt that it was best suited for AirAsia to develop an ASEAN-only business,” Bo Lingam, Group CEO of AirAsia Aviation Group Ltd (AAGL), said. Low-cost carrier (LCC) AirAsia India is currently the country’s fifth-largest airline with a 5.9 per cent market share and it has a fleet of 28 aircraft with 196 daily departures to 18 destinations.…

FOR TECH GIANT Meta, October has been the cruellest month—especially in the past two years. A day after Diwali—the festival of lights that saw millions of messages being exchanged over WhatsApp in India—users the world over used microblogging site Twitter to vent their frustration at being unable to send and receive messages, videos and photos on the messaging platform. Soon, #WhatsAppDown was trending on Twitter after the outage on October 25. The complete bouquet of WhatsApp services—video and voice calls, status features, and other crucial services such as WhatsApp Business and WhatsApp Pay also failed to operate. The outage lasted for about two hours—one of the longest for WhatsApp. Parent company Meta, while apologising for the outage, said: “The brief outage was a result of a technical error on our…

IT’S A TIME OF pessimism. It’s a time of optimism. Both appear to be perfectly valid statements, if we consider the outcome of the latest edition of the Business Today-C Fore Business Confidence Index (BCI). In the July-September 2022 quarter (Q2FY23), the BCI has bounced back to 52.5 against 51.2 in Q1FY23, which was a fall from the 28-quarter high of 55.2 in Q4FY22. Consider the mixed signals emanating from the data. After moderating for three straight months (May to July 2022), Consumer Price Index (CPI)-based inflation has resumed its upward trajectory, rising to 7 per cent in August and 7.41 per cent in September. Wholesale Price Index (WPI)-based inflation, on the other hand, has continued its downward curve, moving from a high of 16.63 per cent in May to…

MANOJ RAGHAVAN recalls at least two occasions when he had to take the wheel after a long overseas flight into Bengaluru. Before you start to wonder why he would do that in the early hours after an arduous travel schedule, it was simply because the driver was dangerously close to nodding off to sleep. There is possibly nothing remarkably unusual about this except that our conversation with Raghavan is on driverless cars. And as CEO & Managing Director of Tata Elxsi, a name in global design and technology services, he is completely involved in what could be a defining moment in the automobile industry. “Imagine you are sitting in a vehicle that is zipping away at 100 km an hour without a driver. It is only natural for your heart…

VAPI IS A two-hour train ride from Mumbai. This small city in Gujarat with a population of 160,000 people once used to be in the news for its worrying pollution levels. More than that, the city is also known for its enterprising business community with high levels of disposable income. But like in many non-metro cities of India, that money is not always visible. About a year ago, the management of Saint-Gobain India caught a glimpse of this wealth when they received a request for a quote from an individual in the city for doing up his home. The requirement included shower enclosures, doors and sliding shutters, among other fitments, and the amount to be spent was a not-so-small ₹20 lakh. Narrating the story, B. Santhanam, CEO of Saint-Gobain, Asia-Pacific…

VAMSI KRISHNA, the 39-year-old CEO and Co-founder of Vedantu — an edtech company—believes in keeping himself energised. “Balance of energy is important. It’s why I like to dabble in some passion or the other,” says the IIT Bombay alumnus. Playing the flute is one of them. “It’s a funny story about why I started playing the flute. My name, Vamsi, means flute in Telugu,” smiles Krishna, adding that his mother is from Andhra Pradesh and had named him. “Subconsciously it was always there that maybe I should learn to play the flute,” he laughs, saying that it was only in the final year of college that he joined a music club on campus and learnt the basics of playing the flute. “I never realised it was going to be such…