Business Today 11 June 2023

Gautam Singhania has a spring in his stride these days. The flamboyant boss of Raymond Ltd has just completed a stellar FY23, where his company has clocked a billion dollars in revenues for the first time in its 98-year existence. The 58-year-old Singhania can afford to be satisfied with the performance of his company, given that it was teetering on the edge just a couple of fiscals ago, battered by the pandemic and the consequent lockdowns. Today, not only has Raymond been able to bounce back into the black, FY23 saw profits doubling along with highest-ever revenues. Hit by the pandemic, when revenues from its businesses from branded textiles to engineering & auto components plunged, leading the company to a ₹297-crore loss in FY21, Singhania went about undertaking a series…

NOTE Rainfall <90% of LPA: Deficient; 90-95%: Below Normal; 96-104%: Normal; 105-110%: Above Normal; and >110%: Excess rainfall SOURCE IMD, REUTERS 96 PER CENT The percentage of the long-period average (LPA) rainfall India would get this monsoon season, the IMD forecasts 35 PER CENT Probability of a normal monsoon this year, compared to a likelihood of 29 per cent below normal and 22 per cent deficit rainfall 75 PER CENT The percentage of total rainfall India receives during the monsoon season, which irrigates over 50 per cent of its farmlands…

POWER PLAY IN FY23, DEMAND AND AVAILABILITY OF ELECTRICITY IN THE COUNTRY GREW BY MORE THAN 9 PER CENT EACH YEAR-ON-YEAR TO HIT A RECORD HIGH (Requirement and availability of electricity in the country) Source: CMIE GREEN POWER THE SHARE OF GREEN ENERGY IN OVERALL POWER GENERATING CAPACITY HAS GROWN 2.5 TIMES IN THE PAST 10 YEARS (Total installed generating capacity in the country) Source: CMIE A NEW HIGH THE CONSUMPTION OF PETROLEUM PRODUCTS HIT A RECORD 222 MILLION TONNES IN FY23, UP NEARLY 42 PER CENT IN 10 YEARS, THANKS TO THE BOOMING ECONOMY Note: Petroleum products include high-speed diesel, motor spirit, LPG, petroleum coke, bitumen and asphalt and light diesel oil, among others. NA: Not available. Source: CMIE THE DARK KNIGHT RAW COAL PRODUCTION REACHED AN ALL-TIME HIGH…

▶ KILLING BY HANGING or injecting a lethal dose has the same effect!” A former senior official of the Reserve Bank of India provided the insightful analogy in a LinkedIn post. This aptly describes the future of the ₹2,000 notes. RBI recently set in motion a policy to completely take out these currency notes from the system. “They were issued as a stop-gap measure,” says Vimal Kumar, Associate Professor at IIT Kanpur, who has written research papers on black money. In fact, the signs of the impending decision were visible much earlier. For instance, their numbers had started falling within two years of their introduction. Per RBI’s annual report, the number of ₹2,000 notes fell from 3.36 billion pieces in March 2018 to 1.81 billion pieces in March 2023. (See…

▶ AT A CURTAIN-RAISER recently to announce the next edition of Asia’s largest civil aviation event, Wings India 2024, Rémi Maillard, President of Airbus India and MD of South Asia, raised eyebrows when he described the Mumbai-based low-cost carrier (LCC) Go First’s bankruptcy filing as a “depressing development”. The event was attended, among others, by Jyotiraditya Scindia, Minister of Civil Aviation, the entire top brass of the Ministry of Civil Aviation, and members of the diplomatic corps. Maillard’s assessment was in sharp contrast to the usually bullish forecasts put out by the Toulouse-based plane-maker on India, the world’s fastest-growing aviation market. Go First, which was operating with an all-Airbus fleet, filed an application for voluntary insolvency with the arbitrator, the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) on May 2, and suspended…

1 ▸ With the suspension of flights by Go First and the revival of Jet Airways now in limbo, market sentiment has been negatively impacted 2 ▸ Airfares, especially on routes serviced by Go First, have jumped due to capacity contraction 3 ▸ A rise in lease rentals and insurance premiums paid by Indian carriers is likely to make air travel costlier 4 ▸ A prolonged crisis may affect the country’s plans to develop allied activities such as MRO infrastructure and aircraft leasing 5 ▸ In the case of Go First going bust, ground handling jobs will be particularly impacted…