Innholdsfortegnelse for 12 May 2024 i Business Today

A recent testament to this enduring legacy was the 50th India Gem and Jewellery Awards (IGJA), a glittering ceremony organized by the Gem & Jewellery Export Promotion Council (GJEPC). The IGJA recognizes and celebrates the outstanding achievements of companies across various segments of the Indian gem and jewellery industry. This year, the 50th edition of the IGJA ceremony was graced by Chief Guest, Shri Ramesh Bais, Hon. Governor, Maharashtra State, and Guest of Honour, business tycoon Shri Mukesh Ambani, Chairman & MD, Reliance Industries Ltd., highlighting the immense significance of the industry to India's economic growth. Today, the $40 billion gem and jewellery industry proudly contributes nearly 14% to India's overall merchandise exports and serves as one of the leading employment generators in the country, providing livelihoods to more than…

WITH 7%-PLUS growth for two consecutive years and easing inflationary pressures, the Indian economy seems to be ready to continue on its high growth trajectory in the new fiscal year. But fresh geopolitical tensions in the Middle East—the recent skirmish between Iran and Israel—have raised new concerns for India. As the world’s third-largest crude oil importer, India is keeping a close watch on the developments in the Middle East. Commerce Secretary Sunil Barthwal recently said the ministry would take any remedial measures required after consultations with stakeholders. The ministries of finance and external affairs, too, are monitoring the developments as oil prices briefly touched $90 per barrel. “Crude oil gets impacted immediately,” says Madan Sabnavis, Chief Economist of Bank of Baroda. In 2023, Iran’s share in total crude oil production…

SILVER PRICES SURGED to a fresh all-time high on the Multi Commodity Exchange (MCX), surpassing the ₹84,000 per kg milestone on April 12. The silver market has experienced significant fluctuations in recent quarters, driven by many factors, including economic indicators, geopolitical uncertainties, and unique market dynamics. Between 2013 and 2019, silver prices steadily declined due to various factors like a strong dollar, the Eurozone debt crisis, and economic slowdowns in major economies. However, according to Kaynat Chainwala, Senior Manager-Commodity Research at Kotak Securities, this trend might shift. In fact, the rise in silver prices on the international market has already reached a three-year high, while on the local market, it has reached new all-time highs. The current rally is mainly driven by record-high gold prices, which, according to Anuj Gupta,…

The country’s civil aviation sector is in direstraits, with major airlines struggling with flight cancellations and delays Four of the Top 5 players are in the red as they continue to bleed thousands of crores in losses annually; IndiGo has turned profitable in 9MFY24 Lack of adequate infrastructure, pilots, and back-up aircraft remain key challenges, with no green shoots in sight By 2030, the government aims to have 200 airports, making air travel accessible to passengers in smaller towns High fuel costs, low-cost model of operations, and high price sensitivity, however, threaten airlines’ health…

IT WAS THE END of the month. X (name withheld on request) received that all-important notification on his phone informing him that his salary had been credited. He immediately opened the banking app on his phone to transfer funds to various accounts to meet daily expenses, set aside savings and investments, etc. He also transferred some money to his wife, a homemaker, to cover her monthly expenses. But then a doubt crept into his mind. Would the money transferred to his wife’s account be considered taxable income for her? Should he then file income tax returns for her? Faced with this dilemma, he reached out to experts. They reassured him that, in most cases, transferring money between spouses for everyday expenses is not taxable. This is because a married couple…

PURE MAGIC For its latest flagship, Samsung has collaborated with Google for its AI smarts. Called Galaxy AI, it comes with a host of features. Take Circle to Search, for instance. Irrespective of the app you’re in, just long-press the home button and circle an object or word. And voila! It is swiftly overlaid with search results without having to switch apps. Then there’s Chat Assist, a convenient solution for adjusting tone, translating, or spell-checking while texting and composing emails, right from the keyboard. Say, you receive a message in Korean on WhatsApp. Chat Assist prompts you to download the language pack and then translates the message. What’s more, it also translates calls in real-time, while the voice recorder can generate transcripts and even a summary in a matter of…

WITH THE GENERAL elections well and truly underway, domestic equity markets have found themselves unexpectedly enveloped in a cloud of uncertainties originating from across the seas. The escalations of tensions in the Middle East, coupled with the rise in global crude oil prices, have heightened their anxieties, casting a pall over market sentiment. Iran’s aerial attack on Israel dragged the benchmark equity index BSE Sensex down nearly 4% in just five trading sessions to 72,489 on April 18 from its all-time intraday high of 75,124 scaled on April 9. The 30-share index rallied nearly 25% in 2023-24. Going ahead, analysts think that volatility will rule the roost and investors should be ready to lap up any opportunities that come their way. But, a majority of market participants believe that the…

THE PAST COUPLE of years have seen many public issues of SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) generating a lot of buzz due to their overwhelming oversubscription and listing gains, and the recent past has been no different. But one significant distinction emerged last month. Cybersecurity firm TAC Infosec saw marquee names such as Bank of America Securities and UBS buying shares of the company from the secondary market within a week after its stellar debut on the bourses—an unprecedented occurrence for the SME segment in recent times. The company, which is backed by well-known stock market investor Vijay Kedia and has offices in Chandigarh, Mumbai, and Bengaluru in India, as well as in San Francisco and Albuquerque in the US, made its debut on the SME platform of the National…

“Please come to Tower 3,” says the helpful voice on the phone once the person realises we are lost at the foot of the six gleaming towers housing Megha Engineering & Infrastructures Ltd (MEIL) that stand out in Balanagar, a decrepit industrial zone in Hyderabad. In Tower 3, we are ushered into a large conference room with a table that can seat 17 (the boss’s chair at the head has the regulation white towel on its armrest) and two massive TV screens hooked up to Megha’s projects. Zoji-la tunnel, anyone? Or a Mongolia refinery in real-time? With 4,000 people working out of this office, it is a beehive of activity. Venkatakrishna Reddy Puritipati, 53—better known as P.V. Krishna Reddy—walks in briskly. He is a lithe 5’8” or so and looks…

ON A SUNNY DAY IN MARCH, NIRMAL JAIN, MD OF FINANCIAL SERVICES COMPANY IIFL FINANCE, GOT A NOTICE FROM THE REGULATOR, THE RESERVE BANK OF INDIA (RBI). THE RBI ASKED the company to immediately stop its gold loan operations, which accounts for a third of its business. The reason: the regulator found some major lapses in how the company handled the loans. When the regulator looked into the company’s finances as on March 31, 2023, it found several lapses, like how the company checked the purity and weight of gold when giving out loans and during auctions after borrowers defaulted. It also found that IIFL Finance had given out and collected cash loans way above the statutory limit. It had not adhered to the standard auction process, and there was…

Arvind Panagariya, Professor of Economics and Jagdish Bhagwati Professor of Indian Political Economy at Columbia University, is the Chairman of the 16th Finance Commission. Panagariya, who was the first Vice Chairman of the NITI Aayog and is a former Chief Economist of the Asian Development Bank, has a PhD in Economics from Princeton University. In an interaction with Business Today TV Managing Editor Siddharth Zarabi at the recent Business Today Banking & Economy Summit held at GIFT City, Gandhinagar, the 71-year-old economist says it is a good time to privatise public sector banks as they are now in good health, are flourishing, and have solid value. Edited excerpts: Q: There has been a growing debate around rising inequality in India in the recent past. Is it true that India has…

REVIEW When you first encounter the Zenbook Duo 2024, the sleek machine exudes an undeniable sci-fi vibe. In fact, unboxing the newest Zenbook immediately evokes a sense of nostalgia, as you can trace the evolution of dual-screen laptops from the Zenbook Pro 15 UX580G in 2018 to the innovative Project Precog by ASUS. Now in 2024, the Zenbook Duo arrives in a compact box, concealing its transformative potential. As you open the box, the familiar angled reveal of ASUS greets you. The Zenbook Duo boasts not one but two dedicated displays that seamlessly integrate into its elegant frame. Gone are the days of cumbersome external secondary screens; instead, the two screens on this laptop are a harmonious blend of form and function. The keyboard attachment, cleverly disguised as a regular…

INDIA’S DEFENCE EXPORTS HAVE JUMPED ALMOST 31-FOLD TO A RECORD OF ₹21,083 CRORE IN FY24 FROM ₹686 CRORE IN FY14, REFLECTING THE COUNTRY’S GROWING CLOUT IN THE GLOBAL DEFENCE MANUFACTURING MARKET. WITH A ROBUST LOCAL MANUFACTURING ECOSYSTEM AND MORE THAN 100 COMPANIES EXPORTING DEFENCE EQUIPMENT, THE GOVERNMENT EXPECTS THE FIGURE TO CROSS ₹50,000 CRORE BY FY29. HERE’S HOW THE DEFENCE SECTOR HAS PROGRESSED OVER THE YEARS: SALES ON FIRE SOURCE PIB DESTINATION LOCKED MYANMAR, SRI LANKA AND MAURITIUS HAVE EMERGED AS THE LEADING DESTINATIONS FOR INDIA’S DEFENCE EXPORTS, TOGETHER ACCOUNTING FOR OVER 50% OF THE TOTAL SOURCE SIPRI/INDIA TODAY EXPLOSIVE GROWTH THE COMBINED PROFIT (CONSOLIDATED) OF THE 15 COMPANIES THAT MAKE UP THE NIFTY INDIA DEFENCE INDEX HAS NEARLY DOUBLED SINCE FY19 SOURCE ACE EQUITY BUDGET BOOST THE UNION BUDGET…

THE YEAR 2024 has so far, been a dazzling one for gold, which has recorded a new high of more than ₹73,000 per 10 gm on the MCX in 2024. The prices are up by more than 10% this year, outperforming the Nifty. The current bullish trend in gold prices is attributed to several factors, including heightened global tensions and increased central bank buying worldwide. Geopolitical risks stemming from conflicts between Ukraine and Russia, and Iran and Israel have fueled the bullion’s demand as a safe-haven asset. Global central banks, including those of the US, China, and India, are piling on gold reserves that helped fuel the rally. Deveya Gaglani, Research Analyst-Commodities at brokerage Axis Securities, says, “The rally is backed fundamentally and is not a bubble, as the return…

IN HYDERABAD’S BANJARA Hills, a tony location in the city, sits the large TV9 headquarters. The building displays a prominent logo of TV9, which has made a mark for itself in the Telugu news business. Under the umbrella of Associated Broadcasting Company Private Limited (ABCPL), TV9 got off the ground in 2004 with a 24-hour Telugu TV news channel. Since then, it has expanded its presence to four more regional markets—Kannada, Marathi, Gujarati, and Bangla—and Hindi, with TV9 Bharatvarsh. It entered the digital space, with websites and YouTube channels, around three years ago. TV9 WAS ACQUIRED JUST BEFORE THE GENERAL ELECTIONS OF 2019 Let’s take a look at its financial performance. The company had revenues of ₹633 crore in FY23 with a net loss of ₹7.8 crore; in FY22, it…

ON APRIL 1, T.V. Mohandas Pai was stuck at the Bengaluru airport. The former Infosys CFO and Chairman of Manipal Global Education and Aarin Capital Partners was scheduled to travel to Ahmedabad on a Vistara flight at 10:30 am, but the departure was pushed back to 12 pm. With no prior intimation from the airline, Pai took to social media platform X to vent his frustration: “Why did they not message the delay? Terrible service, no announcement, no clarity.” Vistara, in its reply, refuted Pai’s claims of not sending out communications, saying it had communicated the delay to the “registered contact details present on the PNR” and said that the flight “was delayed due to operational reasons”. Pai wasn’t the only one. Several Vistara passengers travelling in early April found…

THE NATIONAL STOCK Exchange (NSE) is the country’s largest stock exchange in terms of market share, and, on average, sees trading of shares worth more than ₹1 lakh crore in the cash segment daily. There are more than 90 million registered investors on the bourse with the total number of client codes recently crossing 169 million. The number of client codes is higher as one investor can register with more than one brokerage firm. More importantly, a jump in the number of registered investors, from 80 to 90 million, took just five months—much quicker than the previous 10 million increase that took eight months—even as the cumulative investor base has grown more than 3x in the last five years. A similar trend can be seen on the BSE as well.…

BULGARI Octo Finissimo Ultra COSC Bulgari has once again set the world record for creating the thinnest watch on the planet with the Octo Finissimo Ultra COSC, which is 1.70 mm thick, even thinner than the 1.80 mm it had achieved in 2022. The new watch, limited to only 20 pieces, also boasts of the world’s thinnest chronometer. The 40-millimetre case houses a 170-component manually wound movement with a tungsten carbide back, providing much-needed durability on such a slender piece. If you don’t want to use traditional methods for setting and winding the watch, you can place it in its dedicated case, equipped with a digital display. The desired time is then programmed, and the adjustment cycle is launched at the touch of a button. It’s like having a watchmaker…

IN THE HEART of Khalid Wani, who is the Senior Director of Sales for the India region at the American storage drive maker, Western Digital, beats the rhythm of a fervent traveller. He’s a man who believes passionately that the most precious memories are forged on the road, under distant skies. Although his life is bound by the dictates of a corporate environment, whenever there is time, Wani sets off on impromptu expeditions, especially on his trusty bikes, carrying him to destinations both near and far. For Wani, travel is more than just a journey; it’s an odyssey of discovery shared with family and friends. Each mile traversed, each new horizon reached, holds within it the promise of unforgettable moments. And Wani is careful to treat these memories as priceless…