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| Deficit may be lower as FY05 borrowings ends at Rs 1,02,000 cr NEW DELHI, Feb 9: Assured of positive results of its ongoing fiscal reforms particularly expenditure control measures......more Diet coke
gamble prompts ATLANTA, Feb 9: If coca-cola co should have learned anything from its embarrassing 1985 attempt to introduce new....more Dabur seeks members’ nod for investment proposal NEW DELHI, Feb 9: Home-grown FMCG major Dabur India Ltd (DIL) will seek its members’ approval for authorising....more India aims
defence BANGALORE, Feb 9: India’s defence exports will touch over USD 130 million, topped by sales of helicopters and....more |
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Eco-tourism has incredible opportunity in india: Fox KOLKATA, Dec 9: Eco-tourism has an ‘incredible opportunity’ in India, but the sector is not picking up the momentum......more Now a
‘smiley’ for NEW DELHI, Feb 9: Angry on a friend who is too busy to pick up the phone? Just leave a voice message and he will take....more Policy on
FDI in NEW DELHI, Feb 9: Government is considering opening up of retail and realty sectors for foreign investment and is.....more Siemens to
invest MUMBAI, Feb 9: Global handset major Siemens India Ltd is planning to invest over US dollar 500 million in India in the........more |
Deficit may be lower as FY05
borrowings NEW DELHI, Feb 9: Assured of positive results of its ongoing fiscal reforms particularly expenditure control measures, Government has decided not to tap the bond market any further in the current financial year after curtailing its market borrowing by 24 per cent to Rs 1,02,000cr during 2004-05. In fact, the actual market borrowing is just about two third of the budget target of Rs 1,50,681 crore and the closure of the borrowing programme two months ahead of the fiscal year end reflects the confidence of the Government to have effectively controlled fiscal deficit. Gross market borrowing was even lower than the revised estimate of Rs 1,06,000 crore for 2004-05. According to a senior Finance Ministry official, Centre has completed its borrowing for this fiscal with the Rs 5,000 crore mop up on February 7 through sale of 17-year Government securities offering 8.35 per cent interest rate. With this auction, the total gross borrowing of the centre works out to Rs 1,02,000 crore while net borrowing amounted to Rs 45,684 crore. The gross borrowing for this fiscal was 24 per cent lower than Rs 1,34,500 crore raised till February first week in the previous fiscal. The lower borrowings indicates that fiscal deficit would be reined in within 4.4 per of GDP during 2004-05. The fiscal deficit was 2 per cent lower at Rs 90,239 crore till December this fiscal. Government had no problem in completing its borrowing programme as inflation had been sliding in the last few months while there was excess liquidity in the financial sector. Bond market remains stable but the outlook is still volatile due to the hike in interest rates by the US Central Bank, fall in US dollar value against the rupee and FII inflows in India, a senior official of PNB gilts said. However, the forecast of PM’s Economic Advisory Council on easing inflation and ample liquidity has comforted the bond market, the official said. "The outlook on the bond market will depend on the budget and next year’s borrowing schedule," the official added. (PTI) |
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Diet coke gamble prompts concern, puzzlement ATLANTA, Feb 9: If coca-cola co should have learned anything from its embarrassing 1985 attempt to introduce new coke, it’s that you never needlessly risk the loyalty of your most passionate customers. But that is exactly what the world’s largest soft drink maker may have set in motion on Monday, when it unveiled plans to sell diet coke sweetened with the popular sugar substitute splenda, analysts and beverage industry consultants said. "It’s worse than a riverboat gamble," said Manny Goldman, a San Francisco-based beverage consultant who has followed coca-cola for more than three decades. "Coke is jeopardizing what may be its no. 1 franchise in the country." With the new drink, likely to appear in US stores in the spring, coca-cola has set its sights on capturing a subset of consumers who may not care for the taste of the current form of diet coke, which is made with aspartame. It also has pledged to continue selling regular diet coke, a move designed to assuage consumers already wedded to what is the nation’s most popular diet soft drink. Healthy US demand for diet coke has been crucial to the company’s efforts in recent years to weather a consumer revolt against regular soft drinks and other sugar-laced, high-calorie products. The main danger lurking in the launch of diet coke sweetened with splenda is that it could lead to confusion in supermarkets and other sales venues, especially if its packaging and graphics were too similar to regular diet coke’s. Some consumers could buy the new product by mistake, thinking it was regular diet coke. Others could become angry if they mistakenly believed that diet coke has been reformulated with a different taste. While acknowledging the logic of coke developing a diet cola containing splenda, Morgan Stanley analyst Bill Pecoriello noted that rival pepsico inc was taking a similar plunge but doing so in what appeared to be a less risky way. Purchase, New York-based pepsico is launching a splenda-sweetened diet cola this year through a reformulation of its pepsi one product rather than as a line extension of its diet pepsi brand. Coca-cola’s approach is more of a gamble because it piggybacks on the brand loyalty of a popular product. If the new drink flopped, it could do serious damage to the entire diet coke brand and provide an opening for rivals. Despite the murmurs of concern and puzzlement, some believe that coca-cola has embarked on a prudent strategy that is far preferable to the alternatives, which could have included a risky reformulation of diet coke. "I think this is a carefully thought-through compromise to try to maximize incremental sales and minimize risk to the brand," said Goldman Sachs analyst Marc Cohen, who has an "outperform" rating on coke in the context of a "neutral" rating on the beverage sector. There is, however, almost universal agreement among analysts and industry observers that coca-cola, which is going through a lengthy restructuring, will have to be near-perfect when it markets the splenda version of diet coke. The company has had a patchy track record in the marketing arena lately. It scored a coup several years ago when it introduced vanilla coke but failed to make a splash last year with the roll-out of its mid-calorie coca-cola C2 drink. Shares of coca-cola were up 19 cents to 42.68 in late afternoon trading on the New York Stock Exchange. Pepsi was up 85 cents at 55.55, also on the NYSE. (AGENCIES) |
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Dabur seeks members’ nod for investment proposal NEW DELHI, Feb 9: Home-grown FMCG major Dabur India Ltd (DIL) will seek its members’ approval for authorising the board to acquire the entire equity shares of the Balsara group by way of subscription, purchase or otherwise. The company will seek approval to buy Balsara Hygiene Products Ltd for Rs 120 crore, Balsara Home Products Ltd for Rs 7 crore and Besta Cosmetics Ltd for Rs 20 crore. The Dabur board has appointed chartered accountant V K Jhalani, partner of Jhalani and company, as scrutiniser for conducting the postal ballot process. The postal ballot form duly completed should reach the scrutiniser on or before March 3. The scrutiniaer will submit his final report on March 5. The chairman of the meeting will announce the results of the postal ballot on March 7, Dabur said in a statement. Dil is seeking shareholders’ approval for its recent acquisition of Balsara hygiene and home products business for Rs 143 crore in an all-cash deal. The company has sent out postal ballots for shareholders’ ratification of the deal. The postal ballots have been sent out to 50,000 shareholders of Dabur India and the process is expected to be completed before April. Once the shareholders approve the deal, the company will decide on the amalgamation and positioning of the Balsara brands within the Dabur portfolio. The deal includes the acquisition of three companies and seven brands of Balsara. These brands are three oral-care brands promise, Babool and Meswak. The other brands include mosquito repellent and home-care products like odopic and sani fresh. The babool brand belongs to Besta cosmetics, while the others are with Balsara hygiene products. The third company called Balsara home products owns the three manufacturing facilities of Balsara at Silvassa, Kanpur and Baddi. According to sources, the company will work out a roadmap for the possible changes in the positioning of the brands, and for an effective amalgamation and marketing plan for these brands from the Dabur platform. (UNI) |
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India aims defence exports of USD 130 million this fiscal BANGALORE, Feb 9: India’s defence exports will touch over USD 130 million, topped by sales of helicopters and aircraft built by Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd to friendly nations. "We are hoping to achieve exports of USD 130 million," Defence Secretary (export) Tapan Ray told PTI here. India exported equipment and systems worth USD 93 million in 2003-04, he said. Exports to countries like Nepal and Mauritius include home grown advanced light helicopter (Dhruv), Lancer attack helicopter and Dornier transport plane, he said. State-run aircraft maker HAL, which has designed and developed Dhruv is expecting to close a sale with Chile this year, he said, adding, "if it happens, the export figures would be much higher". The main defence exporters include state-run electronic equipment major Bharat Electronics Ltd, Bharat Earth Movers Ltd and Ordnance Factories Board, besides HAL. BEL chairman Y Gopala Rao said that BEL aims to export USD 15 million worth goods this fiscal, which include radars to Indonesia and Sudan. It also has civil orders valued at over USD 3.8 million for supply of traffic signal systems and solar modules to several countries. HAL has export orders from Israeli aviation industry, Airbus, Snecma and boeing for various components and systems, official said. (PTI) |
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Eco-tourism has incredible opportunity in india: Fox KOLKATA, Dec 9: Eco-tourism has an ‘incredible opportunity’ in India, but the sector is not picking up the momentum as it should have been, feels Michael Fox, a senior consultant to private and public sector and development agencies in travel and tourism industry worldwide. Addressing a lecture on ‘eco-tourism’ at the American Centre and organised by the Nature, Environment and Wildlife Society (NEWS) here last evening, Mr Fox said, ‘eco-tourism is a unique component of India’s competitiveness as a tourism destination, but the country has to be branded and marketed properly for the purpose to attract maximum tourist attraction.’ Mr Fox, whose consulting projects include stints as tourism advisor to the IUCN and the UNESCO on sustainable tourism investment and conservation of the environmentally threatened world heritage sites, observed that it was time to understand the huge scope that eco-tourism had in store globally. ‘Globally speaking, the tourism and the hospitality industry contribute ten per cent of all GDP, ten per cent of capital investment and provide ten per cent of all jobs," he said, adding that eco-tourism was one of the fastest growing sectors pegged at ten to 30 per cent per annum worldwide. "Eco-tourism implies a scientific and aesthetic or philosophical approach to understand nature and go for its conservation. It s all about a responsible travel that conserves the natural environment and sustains the well being of the local people," he said. A successful eco-tourism project comprised a chain of supplier, whole-seller, intermediary, retailer and consumer chain and to create that intense research work and an effective marketing strategy were needed, he said. "But what is most important is network," network and network,"the expert observed. "In India there are a number of pristine locales which can be developed as lucrative eco-tourism hubs. However, the country is yet to pick up the acceleration in the sector. It needs a proper branding to exploit the possibilities, Albeit positively, about those localities and to promote those the world-wide web may be used," he said. To a query whether tourism would suffer in the post-Tsunami scenario, he said, "no doubt that the Tsunami has left behind destruction of immense magnitude. It may pose a temporary block for the tourism industry" but the sector will ultimately look up, sooner or later, in the affected parts of India and the rest of the Asian lands like those in Sri Lanka and Phuket." "There was the September 11 massacre in the US and the bird flu in some Asian countries and tourism was badly hit immediately after. Everybody apprehended whether the sector would ever be revived. But it took very little time for the tourism industry there. Similarly, after the Tsunami devastations, it’s just a matter of time for the tourism industry to be ultimately revived," said Mr Fox. (UNI) |
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Now a ‘smiley’ for your thought! NEW DELHI, Feb 9: Angry on a friend who is too busy to pick up the phone? Just leave a voice message and he will take the hint through an on-screen ‘emotica’ - a new age technological marvel, to hit the market soon. ‘Emotive alerts’, a pathbreaking research on voicemail systems undertaken by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Promises to revolutionise the cellular phone technology, where labelling of messages will be possible using a software that identifies the tone of a callers’ voice and tags the message as ‘urgent’, ‘happy’, ‘formal’, ‘informal’ or ‘sad’, converting them into popular emoticas. On receiving such an emotica, for example, a ‘smiley’, the subscriber can prioritise his messages, simplifying the common problems of a jammed voicemail box and missing important calls. He can skip the cumbersome process of having to go through the entire voicemail content to sort out the urgent ones. One can also start the day on a happy note by sorting the ‘happy’ messages first, say Mit researchers Zeynep Inanoglu and Ron Caneel of the media lab who designed it and recently published in the science journal ‘newscientist.Com’. According to the research, the first of its kind, "the first ten seconds of voicemail messages were used for labelling and training." Based on a study by scientists Whittaker, Hirshbeg Et Al, (all talk and all action) which claims that human beings choose in the first 10 seconds whether to stop or keep listening to the voice, 361 message labels were compared with a previously stored data bank of hundrends of voice messages according to their ‘pitch’ ‘loudness’ and ‘rhythm’. By extracting "salient acoustic features" from various voicemails, the researchers decided to consider four "axes" in voicemail correspondece. They have categorised these axes as `valence’ (happy, sad) `activation’ (calm, excited) urgency, mality and informality," the researchers say. During trial runs on real messages, the software was actually able to distinguish between emotions ranging from excited and calm, happy and sad, but faultered during the formal and informal and urgent and non-urgent tones. However, when the product is ready, it may take some time to reach the Indian subscribers. Not much is being done to update and popularise the cellular telephony market here. "The closest that the country has reached vis-a-vis research on artificial intelligence are works on speech simulations by the bangalore based organisation simputer," says Dr Amitabh Mukherjee, faculty of the Computer Science and Engineering Department of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. "As far as I know no similar research is going on here in this country and it can be attributed to the fact that the telephony penetration here is so low," he says. "This is clearly a market driven research. The end users in India are very low compared to the western market to warrant the popularity of a such a software," Mukherjee says. "In the artificial intelligence sector, the simputer group has been developing voice recognition software which includes the encoding of human speech, which is the nearest we have gone to this kind of research," he says. The lack of "enough end customers" coupled with a still growing communications market, is enough reason that such research would take a long time to reach the Indian consumers, he says. (PTI) |
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Policy on FDI in retail in next two months: Kamal Nath NEW DELHI, Feb 9: Government is considering opening up of retail and realty sectors for foreign investment and is expected to firm up its policy in next two months. "We are examining various parameters... We should be able to come with a policy in next two months," Commerce and Industry Minister Kamal Nath told reporters on sidelines of Indo-American Chamber of Commerce Summit on infrastructure. "We have had discussions with the retail sector... We want incremental FDI to come in the sector. We do not want FDI which would displace the existing investment," he said adding that more discussions were to be held. Asked if the FDI in retail will form a part of India’s offer on services at WTO, which have to be tabled before may 31, Nath said," our offers in mode 2 and 3 would be driven by offers we recieve in mode 1 and 4." For supply of services, mode 1 is for cross border supply(eg-business process outsourcing), mode 2 is investing overseas(eg-foreign banks), mode 3 is consumption of service abroad(eg-tourism, education) and mode 4 is movement of natural persons. Nath said while the policy may be a part of the offers it was not driven by the offers. He said FDI in realty should be driven towards construction and not just investment in land holdings and the policy would aim to address this. (PTI) |
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Siemens to invest USD 500 mn in India for expansion MUMBAI, Feb 9: Global handset major Siemens India Ltd is planning to invest over US dollar 500 million in India in the next three to four years for setting up new factories and expanding its existing capacities in the country. "Primarily the investments will be made by Siemens India as it is in financially very good shape. But if necessary, Siemens AG will also chip in with new investment plans," Siemens AG chairman of the Supervisory Board Heinrich V Pierer told reporters here today. Siemens would be setting up more Research and Development (R&D) centres and it would be adding more software professional in R&D centre in Bangalore, Pierer said. "India is not only a good place for local manufacturing but also export base," he said while speaking on the sidelines of a "NASSCOM 2005 India leadership forum". "Siemens will be adding 70 more professionals in its Bangalore R&D centre. We are keen on tapping the pool of engineers available in India," he added. The company is planning export software solutions, hardware and medium-sized switch gear from India even as it is expecting a 10 per cent growth from India. (PTI) |
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Tata power to raise USD 200 mn through FCCB offering MUMBAI, Feb 9: Tata Power Company Ltd will raise USD 200 million through Foreign Currency Convertible Bonds (FCCB) from international capital market. The offering opened for subcription today. These bonds would be listed on the Singapore Stock Exchange, the company informed the Stock Exchange, Mumbai (BSE). The one per cent coupon FCCB offering having a five-year maturity would be convertible at 50 per cent premium over the closing share price of February eight. It would bear a yeild to maturity of 3.88 per cent compounded semi-annually. JP Morgan would be the sole underwriter and bookrunner to the offering, the company added. (PTI) |
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BJP for electoral reform, change
in air NEW DELHI, Feb 9: BJP today flayed UPA Government’s move to make it mandatory for filing information on property transactions beyond Rs 30 lakh saying it would only encourage concealment rather than curb generation of black money. The main opposition party was also against any new tax amnesty scheme to unearth black money, as it only regularises tax evasion and punishes honest taxpayers. The better way to tackle black money should be to bring in electoral reforms first as the present manner of funding elections was the ‘fountain head’ of black money generation, Jagdish Shettigar, a member of BJP’s economic think-tank, told PTI here. In a letter to Finance Minister P Chidambaram, Shettigar proposed an "integrated approach" which include economic, political and administrative reforms to check generation of black money. Shettigar, a former member of Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council, said "a sincere effort of unearthing black money by Finance Minister should start with his own tribe —politicians." The Government should start examining the financial disclosures made by politicians while filing their election nomination papers, he said. Electoral reforms including state-funding of elections and controlling real expenditures could curb black money generation, he added. Critical of some of the provisions in Annual Information Return (AIR) system, Shettigar said the need to file air on property transactions above Rs 30 lakh would lead to more concealments, which would mean rise in black money. One of the major reason for under-valuation of property is high stamp duties, Shettigar said, adding reforms in construction related activities should be initiated to make housing affordable and at the same time curb black money. Recalling tax amnesty scheme VDIs of Chidamabaram in late 1990s, Shettigar said "there is a suspicion that it was a scheme not for unearthing black money but to make money." Shettigar alleged that there was a suspicion that informations about persons, who disclosed income voluntarily during the VDIs scheme, were passed on to the underworld. While the underworld extracted huge funds from those people, a portion of it went to the political system as well, he said. In principle, he said "I don’t support amnesty schemes as it means regularising tax evasion and punishment to honest taxpayers. It may discourage many potentital tax payers to comply also." (PTI) NEW DELHI, Feb 9: The domestic tea industry has said prices of tea will increase in case states opt for the 12.5 per cent category of the Value Added Tax (VAT) for this commodity. The Tea Packeters Association of India (TPAI) pointed out that the empowered committee of State Finance Ministers on VAT has declared that states have the option to classify tea in the 4 per cent or 12.5 per cent category. However, TPAI said if any State Government decides to include tea in the 12.5 per cent classification, it will lead to rise in prices of the commodity. Though reports suggest that prices of other commodities would come down after the implementation of VAT, prices of tea, a key component of monthly household budgets, would actually go up if placed in the 12.5 per cent category, it added. "It is hard to imagine an Indian household where tea is not a staple item on the kitchen shelf and the move on the part of the State Government to include tea in the 12.5 per cent VAT category would have a detrimental effect for the common man," TPAI said in a statement here. Pointing out that tea is an essential item of mass consumption and the cheapest drink next to water, the association cautioned that VAT on tea at 12.5 per cent at multiple points with the impact of wholesale and retail trade margins will lead to a final incidence of nearly 16 per cent rise for the consumer. Since tea is an agricultural produce, the move will also have a detrimental effect on the livelihood of millions employed in the agricultural sector, TPAI said, maintaining that placing tea in a 12.5 per cent vat category may actually result in a fall in revenue collections. While deficit in revenues will be made up for by State Governments, a rise in taxation leading to higher tea prices would create a decline in consumption, said the association. It cited various consumer groups in support of its plea for putting tea in the four per cent category including a note by the consumer education and research centre, which has expressed surprise over the wisdom of placing tea in the 12.5 per cent category. (UNI) |
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