India’s trade minister Anand Sharma today held a ’round table conference’ with foreign companies and others to address their concerns about the country’s foreign investment (FDI) policy for the retail sector. The meeting came after many foreign firms, such as Wal-Mart, seemed to have gone slow in firming up their plans for investing in the […]
The government of India has withdrawn its three month old circular on how to calculate taxes payable by captive research & development (R&D) units of foreign companies in India. The circular, which would impact tax rates of companies like IBM, Microsoft, Samsung, GE, Google and others in India, was issued on March 26. While the […]
While many exporters have never been happier thanks to the steep fall in the level of rupee to 60 per dollar, the Electronics and Computer Software Export Promotion Council (ESC) has urged policy makers to take a longer term view. The association pointed out that while, in the short term, exporters will get more rupees […]
Private Equity firms invested about $2,330 million across 82 deals during the quarter ended June 2013, according to early data from Venture Intelligence, a research service focused on private company financials, transactions and valuations in India. The investment amount was 17.7% higher than that invested in the same period last year ($1,980 million across 114 […]
Santosh Koli, one of the 11 Aam Admi Party candidate for the Seemapuri assembly constituency in Delhi, has recovered from her critical condition after an accident last week. Koli and her co-worker were hit by a car on their way to their office a week ago. AAP said Koli, a long time member of Arvind […]
Taiwanese peripherals and laptop maker Asus has signed on a second India-wide distributor to expand its reach across the market. Along with existing distributor Rashi Peripherals, Ingram Micro, a Fortune 100 company, will help the company widen its base, Asus India said. Unlike Rashi, Ingram is an international firm, and is expected to give marketing […]
SanDisk has tapped Freescale Semiconductor’s India head Ganesh Guruswamy to head its Bangalore-based India Design Center. Guruswamy, who has been appointed Vice President, will be in charge of leading the memory device maker’s Bangalore-based engineering teams to devleop what it called its next-generation consumer storage solutions, including USB flash drives, memory cards, microSD cards, and […]
One of India’s biggest neutraceuticals and health-food brands, Dabur, has clarified that it was not aware of exports of its products from India to the USA, leading to a US FDA alert. Media reports had said that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the agency that approves drugs and medicines and maintains quality of packaged […]
Google has unveiled what seems like a winner for the search company — rich, targeted ads from online retailers next to search results. The new service, called ‘Product Listing Ads’, is far more sophisticated and ‘compelling’ than the link-based ads that used to appear till now. Not only are these richer in information, but in […]
As expected, the Reserve Bank of India today held key interest rates unchanged despite calls from industry lobbies for easing money supply, despite a dip in inflation to about 9.3 percent. The following are key reactions to RBI’s move. CII The quarterly GDP figures point towards a poor health of the economy even while industrial […]
Crisil Research said it expected industrial growth to continue to recover “somewhat” over the next fiscal year with the help of a normal monsoon and lower inflation and interest rates. The research wing of Crisil ratings agency said it continued to expect inflation to fall further and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to cut […]
Nokia will launch its first Windows smartphone in around 12 months from now, and not 2 years as is being widely reported, its head for India D Shivakumar said in Delhi today. He said the new phone will tightly integrate with the rest of Microsoft’s services such as Bing Search, Zune music player and Facebook, […]
How much does Facebook care about Freedom of Expression? This is the question a group of liberals in the southern Indian state of Kerala are pondering over after their ‘Free Thinkers’ group has been ‘made unavailable’ by Facebook repeatedly. The group was among the top 20 or so from India until it was blocked by […]
The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) want to go for permanent foreign teachers, the Union Ministry of Human Resources Development said in a statement. The IITs, one of the world’s leading technology education brands, are currently facing shortage of qualified teachers. They are currently allowed to appoint temporary teachers from abroad to tide of the […]
Improvements in global economic environment, particularly in the US, recovery in exports, normal Monsoon and bottoming out of the industrial expansion are the strong reasons for revival of the Indian economy, which is very likely to grow a shade above six per cent in the current financial year, an Assocham Economic Outlook Report has pointed […]
Thanks to a relentless increase in Diesel prices by state-owned retailers, waiting periods of petrol cars in India have zoomed to weeks, or in some cases – months, in recent days. Among the cars that have become nearly impossible to get at short notice are the Maruti Suzuki Ritz and Swift, and to some extent, […]
Consumers may be flooding the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) and other organizations with complaints about Mobile Number Portability (MNP), but the TRAI is yet to impose even a single fine on a telecom operator in this regard. According to a statement by the Department of Telecom, the TRAI has never imposed a fine […]
It is rare for a telecom company to come out with a press release announcing an across the board tariff increase, but in an era of beaten down stock valuations, companies are taking desperate measures. Reliance Communications, one of the companies that has the lowest stock valuation compared to its revenue and earnings, has announced […]
Despite challenging economic conditions, the enterprise software market in India is projected to reach $3.92 billion in 2013, a 13.9 per cent growth over 2012 revenue of $3.45 billion, according to Gartner, Inc. Last year, overall Indian enterprise IT spending, which includes hardware and services — in addition to software — was forecast to increase […]
The Business Confidence of India Inc has taken a beating in the last few weeks and more so in the last 10-12 days as the foreign institutional investors which were single-handedly keeping the capital market alive have started withdrawing posing a big question on the source of financing the country’s wide current account deficit, an […]
