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Textile major Arvind Mills which has been recently going through a bad patch owing to rising rupee, reducing exports and falling margins is undertaking a business transformation in a bid to become a billion dollar company.
The company has firstly changed its name from ‘Arvind Mills Ltd’ to ‘Arvind Ltd’ with a new logo and identity to reflect a company which is diversified with focus on branded apparel and retail.
After taking a beating in its front-end petroleum retail venture, Reliance Industries is planning to convert the closed outlets into malls and multiplexes.
Of the 1432 outlets closed, 500 are company owned and rest dealer-owned. Reliance plans to develop around 300 dealer owned properties along with its own ones which are situated at strategic locations.
The properties would be developed through Reliance Industrial Infrastructure with an investment of Rs.5,000 crore and includes buying out of some properties owned by the dealers.
After the talks of a JV between Reliance Retail and Yash Raj Films for a multiplex foray, there is now talks of Manmohan Shetty, founder of Adlabs Films to team up for a nationwide operation of 500 screens.
It is likely that Manmohan Shetty may quit Adlabs as it is now with ADAG and is also in process of name change. YRF and Shetty will form a company producing movies, games and other shows, and would provide content to Reliance entertainment venture.
In the growing breed of GEC channels in India, another new channel is to be launhced in July called ‘COLORS’. The channel is brought by Viacom18, which is a equal JV between Viacom and Network18.
The channel would be targeted towards mass audience and leverage its existing audience of young adults through their channels MTV, Vh1 and Nick. The tagline of the channel is captured as ‘Jasbaat Ke Rang’ signifying the universal appeal of its programmes.
The common problems among most Indian investors is how to find out the best available FD rates among all Indian banks whether public, private or foreign. As it is virtually impossible to visit individual banks or their websites as there are over 100 of them operating in India.
Moreover, most of the financial portals does not carry a substantial information and is also not regularly updated. Even the rates given in pink financial dailies is inadequate to carry out an investment decision.
The best website which I found for comparing fixed deposit rates is ratekhoj.com The website can compare FD rates using various criteria like period, institution type, senior/non-senior/NRI and even of individual banks.
The website also carries a tool to compare rates for credit cards, home, vehicle, educational and personal loans.
The best part of the website is that it the interest rates are regularly updated and as such makes decision making easy to get the maximum interest.
Bharti Airtel has aspirations of becoming a telecom leader of the emerging countries by placing a bid of $19 billion for 51% stake in Johannesburg based MTN, a telecom company having operations in 21 countries of Africa, Middle East and Europe.
The bid would value MTN at $37 billion, a stifle more than its market capitalisation of $35.6 billion. However, according to FT, MTN would like the bid to be atleast 10% more than the current one.
Bharti has a market cap of $40 billion and subscribers nearly equal to MTN subscribers and the bid would give them a global expansion and take advantage of diversifying its operations to ward off slowdown in different markets.
India’s largest multiplex chain, Adlabs is going for a rebranding exercise to bring the name is sync with the group’s other entertainment ventures such as FM, DTH, DVD rental, music and movie production.
In the next 2 weeks, all 54 multiplexes of Adlabs across the country would be named as “Big Cinema” and the change would reflect uniformly across all physical elements like signage, tickets and other paraphernalia used in the multiplexes.
Bharti Airtel, IFFCO and Star Global have formed a 50:25:25 JV called IFFCO Kisan Sanchar to provide telephone services in rural areas. Apart from telephones, the company will provide rural products such as transistors, community radios, torches and lanterns with a battery life of three years.
While IFFCO will use its vast rural network for marketing the services, Airtel would be the service provider. Uptil now, 48000 farmers have joined the scheme and is targeted to have 15 crore customers by 2011.
Once considered the flagship scheme of Indian Mutual Fund industry, the UTI US-64 scheme is finally (much to the relief of Indian government) coming to end with its US-64 bonds maturing on May 31, 2008.
The redemption would mean payments of close to Rs.8,000 crore to over 12 lakh investors by Specified Undertaker of Unit Trust of India (SUUTI). SUUTI was formed as a result of the split of erstwhile UTI into UTI AMC (which got all the NAV based schemes) and SUUTI (which got large equity holdings, properties and 25 assured return schemes).
World’s largest B2B portal Alibaba.com has tied up with India’s largest yellow pages company, Infomedia India (owned by Network 18 Fincap) to officially foray into the lucrative Indian market and cater the needs of 80 lakh small and medium Indian businesses.
Globally, Alibaba has 27 million users across 200 countries, out of which 0.4 million users are situated in India which are mainly trading in textiles, jewellery, auto parts and chemicals. For Alibaba, India is among the top three markets along with US and South-East Asia and represents represents 8% of its total business.
Post demerger of Reliance industries Ltd., the next demerger to happen in Indian corporate is the demerger of Bajaj Auto Ltd (BAL).
The record date fixed for demerger was March 25, 2008 as a consequence of which shareholders of the Bajaj Auto will receive shares of the three demerged new companies in the ratio of one share each for every one share held in Bajaj Auto.
For the last one month, there has been lot of buzz created around with the launch of Virgin Mobile into the Indian market, and many people have been comparing it with the likes of another UK telecom major, Vodafone.
However Virgin Mobile does not have neither the network nor the spectrum to start its mobile operations. It is just an agreement with Tata Teleservices wherein Virgin Group has a brand franchise arrangement targeted primarily at the youth segment.
ICICI BranchIn a move which would affect 15% of its total savings banks account, ICICI Bank has increased the minimum quarterly average balance required for its savings accounts from current Rs.5,000 to Rs.10,000 w.e.f. July 1, 2008.
The revision has been made after a long gap and according to the bank is due to rise in infrastructure costs. However, this may also be a part of the company’s change in strategic focus as it would have fulfilled its targeted customer base and would have wanted to switch to accounts with higher deposits.
Come next year, and you may have to update all your mobile and phone directories as all mobile numbers will then have 11 digits instead of current 10 digits with ‘9′ being prefixed to all mobile numbers and thus ‘99′ will become the first two digits of every mobile number.
The above plan is another testimony to growing mobile market in India with 8 million mobile subscribers being added each month and total subscribers to soon overtake that of US subscribers becoming the second largest mobile market in the world.
It’s time for unlocked iPhone sellers in India to close shop as cell operator Vodafone is officially bringing the much awaited iPhone to the country in September this year. The price of iPhone in India will be around 28k.
Steve Jobs hinted last month that iPhone launch in India would happen sometime in 2008 and that Apple may not restrict the iPhone distribution deal to just one operator like they do in the US where AT&T is the exclusive distributor.
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