Innholdsfortegnelse for 24-Jan-21 i Business Today

Worrisome Dip BCI Falls to Record Low Level in October-December Quarter Macro Update Gap between exports and imports shrinks, inflation another bright spot First things first! Business Confidence Index (BCI) has changed. For over nine years since BCI started, the survey has set the benchmark for gauging the mood of corporate India. But to improve upon the survey, we have tweaked the methodology in the latest survey. The good news is that in a sea of similar confidence surveys (most of which were commissioned after Business Today’s BCI), the new methodology has raised the game by measuring the sentiments with sheer precision. The bad news is that corporate India seems to remain largely despondent about their business prospects and economy per se. On a scale of 100, BCI fell sharply…

Capital intensive. It takes over $ 3 billion to set up a FAB unit. Then there is a high recurring cost for upgrades. Few companies in India have the required balance sheet strength or risk appetite Policy uncertainty. The industry needs capital as well as interest subsidy on investment, tax holiday and sovereign guarantee on demand aggregation Ecosystem. Chip manufacturing cannot take off unless the supplier industry is in place. That requires top-notch infrastructure, including uninterrupted power and abundant pure water Exports. India has to be part of multi lateral trade agreements to ensure it becomes competitive for export of chips. For investors, domestic demand is not enough…

While kiranas are traditional hyperlocal retailers, the sector has seen start-up interest since 2013/14, when Swiggy, Zomato and Food Panda started delivering food from local restaurants Start-ups such as Urban Company offer services of plumber, carpenter, electricians etc Tech start-ups such as Jumbotail, Snapbizz, Near.Store and CostpriZe have ventured into hyperlocal retail by onboarding kiranas onto their technology platforms Last-mile delivery operators such as Dunzo, Shadowfax, Ship Rocket and Delhivery are scaling up hyperlocal operations The pandemic has also led to cable operators and facility management companies venturing into last-mile hyperlocal delivery FMCG majors such as HUL and ITC have also gone hyperlocal through initiatives such as MyKirana.com and ITC eStore…

Grocery is a boring, low-margin business. But that did not prevent cyber criminals from stealing data of 20 million customers of online grocer BigBasket and selling it for a staggering $40,000 or nearly ₹30 lakh on the dark web. And that too non-financial data such as name, email ID, PIN, contact number, address, date of birth, location, IP address. BigBasket had thankfully not stored customers’ financial data such as debit/credit card details. But companies and their customers are not always so fortunate. In 2016, security of close to 3.2 million debit cards issued by major banks, including SBI, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Yes Bank and Axis Bank, among others, was compromised. The breach, caused by a malware on an ATM network, resulted in not just financial loss to consumers and…

In 2009, a 24-year-old employee of Singapore-based software-as-a-service (Saas) customer engagement firm Capillary Technologies went on a holiday and didn’t return. It was found that he had a break-up and had committed suicide. Two years on, a similar incident occurred in the company. “He was 23, looked happy and was doing quite well in the organisation. In fact, we had moved him to Mumbai,” says Aneesh Reddy, Co-founder and CEO. The firm is still not sure what happened in this case though. “Generally we hire a batch of 5-10 freshers from campus, but no one from his cohort knew,” adds Reddy. The incidents were an eye-opener for Reddy. “I realised the extent of stigma around mental health and how important it is to ensure that people have access to someone…

When gyms, parks and fitness centres were out of bounds during the peak of the Covid-19 lockdown, Sanjiv Mehta, Chairman and MD of the country’s biggest FMCG company, Hindustan Unilever, walked up and down the staircase of his 57-storey apartment complex in central Mumbai, to stay fit. “Me and my wife climbed five floors on the first day, we did 10 floors on day two and 15 on day three, then we had a good rhythm of 20 floors and I was feeling very pleased with myself. One day we bumped into a person on the stairway, who looked my age. I asked him where he was coming from. He said he stayed on the 18th floor and climbed 57 floors every day. That set the context.” Mehta also connected…

Central government expenditure rose 9.5 per cent year-on-year in October to ₹1.8 lakh crore in comparison to robust 46.7 per cent increase in non-debt receipts. It was the first rise in two months This helped government keep gross fiscal deficit (GFD) at ₹39,160 crore in October as compared with ₹79,000 crore monthly average for April-October Capital spending more than doubled to ₹31,520 crore from ₹13,760 crore in October 2019 Source: MOSPI CENTRAL GOVERNMENT EXPENDITURE (Y-o-Y % Change)…

FINANCE MINISTER NIRMALA SITHARAMAN will present Budget 2021 in the backdrop of an exceptionally chaotic 2020. In Q1 of FY21, India’s lockdown-struck gross domestic product (GDP) contracted an unprecedented 23.9 per cent, the worst among major economies. When the economy opened up, pent-up demand pushed up consumption, but GDP still shrank 7.5 per cent in Q2. And even though the RBI predicts that the economic shrinkage is over and GDP will grow 0.1 per cent and 0.7 per cent in third and fourth quarters, respectively, FY21 is destined to go down in history as India’s fifth recession. It is in this backdrop of extreme stress that Sitharaman sought growth inducing ideas with the promise to deliver “a Budget like never before”. Under the circumstances, that’s a herculean task. After all,…

At BigBasket, data of 20 million users, including name, email ID, PIN, contact number, address, date of birth, location, along with IP address, available for sale – November 2020 Data breach at Dr Reddy’s Laboratories resulted in shutdown of all production facilities across the world for 24 hours – November 2020 Administrative network of Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant of Nuclear Power Corporation of India in Tamil Nadu was breached in malware attack. However, plant systems were not affected – September 2019 Data of over 100 million users of local search service JustDial was publicly available – April 2019…

INDIA’S LARGEST AUTOMOTIVE component maker Bosch faced an unforeseen situation in early December — shortage of semiconductor components. The reason was surge in demand for consumer electronics globally due to work from home and rise in adoption of 5G in household appliances. This could not have come at a more inappropriate time. Demand for automobiles was just beginning to rebound after a torrid first half of the year when production was disrupted due to lockdown in April-May. Another disruption can impair the recovery, which is what Bosch warned in a letter to market regulator Sebi. “Imports of Bosch Ltd have been impacted with severe shortage of imported microprocessors (semiconductors), leading to reduced ability to deliver to the automotive market demand in India,” it said. Disruption in supply of even a…

You have stayed focussed on telecom. Are you thinking of getting into providing content and other such services? There is no service provided by a telecom company in the world which Airtel does not provide. Yes, we don’t produce our own content. We don’t have our own studios but we have tie-ups — Amazon, Netflix, Zee5. We will never be good at doing stuff that others do better than us. A classic case and I can reveal it today is the AT&T-Time Warner acquisition. When that happened, I straight away spoke to the AT&T CEO. He said the world has changed, smartphones have come and you will be able to groom content for mobile phone screens. He told me he would ensure that Time Warner and AT&T are miles away,…

Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) is proclaimed to be the ultimate technology for keeping informationsharing safe over the network. It uses photons, particles of light, to generate a random secret key. Using this key, the messages can be encrypted and decrypted. In case of any interference from an unauthorised third party, the composition of photons is altered, rendering the randomlygenerated keys inoperable. Toshiba has successfully deployed the technology in partnership with Quantum Xchange to enhance capacity for the first quantum-secured network in the US. Toshiba QKD technology can detect if somebody is eavesdropping or attempting to steal information.…

The agenda of well-being programmes should be to make employees feel good and well, not more productive Use language sensitively. Phrases such as war for talent give the impression to employees that there is no leeway to slow down Reward empathetic leadership traits, incentivise managers who listen and take care of their teams Create safe spaces within organisations for people to have radically honest conversations…

Be it collecting winter flowers or capturing them though his lenses, Esri India President Agendra Kumar’s love for nature knows no bounds. With a large garden at home, Kumar has been adding varieties of Chrysanthemum for over 18 years. An avid flower lover, Kumar, along with his wife, started this as a serious hobby around 2002. “We sourced chrysanthemums from different countries to build a collection of over 200 varieties, which was the largest in Delhi at that time,” says Kumar. He participated in various chrysanthemum shows and has won awards too. Today, Kumar has around 400 potted Chrysanthemums at home, along with 50 other varieties of winter flowers, including petunia, dahlia, dianthus, salvia, pansy, alyssum, hollyhock, antirrhinum, begonia, cineraria, verbena, carnations and aster, to name a few. Other than…

Sanjay Chakrabarti, Founding Partner, tag8, a firm whose solutions facilitate the finding and return of lost valuables, played Under-19 against Sachin Tendulkar in mid-90s. But when he took up a job, he lost all the fitness. “It was a demanding 12-14-hour job, and I had access to the best junk food, and that too, on office expenses,” he laughs. Thanks to a two-year-long sedentary lifestyle of all work and eat but no play, acidity became a part and parcel of his life. “I would take Gelusil every day. It had become a dessert for me. Once my grandmother caught me off-guard and warned something is dramatically wrong with me. Between that day and now, I have never spent a week when I have not walked, ran or worked out.” Even…