Business News

Indian Renewable Energy Development Agency Ltd (IREDA) has opened an office in GIFT City at Gandhinagar which will specialise in providing debt options denominated in foreign currencies to facilitate natural hedging and significantly reduce the financing costs for green hydrogen and renewable energy manufacturing projects, the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy said on Thursday.

Just ahead of its mega FPO opening to public investors, Vodafone Idea (VIL) has announced closure of its anchor book allocation, raising about Rs 5,400 crore from marquee global as well as domestic investors, according to a statutory filing by the telco. This could be the third-largest anchor book after One 97 Communications and Life Insurance Corporation (LIC).

In an abrupt move, Arjun Mohan, who was elevated as the embattled edtech firm Byju CEO just about seven months back, has quit to pursue other opportunities, the company confirmed on Monday.The company's Co-founder and CEO Byju Raveendran will take a more hands-on approach in spearheading the daily operations of the company after Mohan's resignation, who will be part of the edtech firm in an "external advisory role".

After facing significant flight disruptions recently, Vistara CEO Vinod Kannan on Thursday told the airline staff that the "worst is behind us" and operations have already stabilised. Pilot woes have forced the Tata Group airline to temporarily cut down capacity by 10 per cent, affecting about 25-30 flights daily. Kannan also said it has been a "learning experience".

Indian brands are turning cautious with their retail expansion. Hence, the leasing in the sector is expected to sustain at 6-6.5 million square feet in 2024, according to the latest report by the commercial real estate firm CBRE. The saturation follows the remarkable growth in 2023, as brands absorbed a little over 7 million sq ft. The supply environment in terms of retail space like malls and high streets is also expected to be stable in the current year. By the year-end, 5-6 mn. sq. ft. of investment-grade mall space will become operational in tier-I cities.

The country is in the midst of a real estate upcycle, yet the pace of new project launches has slowed down in the top four cities. The number of launches went down by 2% in Mumbai and 4% in Ahmedabad in the January-March quarter of 2024. National Capital Region (NCR) and Hyderabad showed a marginal 3% and 1% respectively, as per data launched by Knight Frank India. But, that’s only half the story.

Coffee shipments from India rose 13.35 per cent to 1,25,631 tonnes during January-March period of this year on higher demand for Robusta coffee, according to the official data. The country had exported 1,10,830 tonnes of coffee in the same period in 2023. India, Asia's third-largest producer and exporter, grows Arabica and Robusta varieties of coffee.

Online food delivery platform Swiggy has announced that it now delivers to tourists staying on houseboats on Dal Lake in Srinagar, Jammu & Kashmir. The company has partnered with Shikara operators who will assist local delivery partners to deliver to the doorsteps of the houseboats. This opens up new opportunities for restaurants to reach customers in unique locations.

Indians have gotten habituated to fishing out their phones instead of cards, and that’s been fuelling a remarkable increase in UPI payments. Unlike their uppity cousins (credit cards), debit cards have been losing out on transaction value and volume. But all’s not lost for these ubiquitous cards. People seem to ‘still’ rely on debit cards for large-sized purchases, as per data by Worldline’s India Digital Payments Report.

Even as Indians’ love for buying homes refuses to die down, institutions seem to have a contra view of the real estate sector. In the Jan-March quarter, institutions poured $1 billion into the sector — which is a 40% drop as compared to the same quarter last year, says a report by Colliers.

Bidding to reduce their reliance on the exorbitant tankers — a necessary step after the exhaustion of half the city’s groundwater-fed borewells — many residential societies have begun innovating water-saving techniques, with varying degrees of success. However, for the several businesses and industries littering the metropolitan town, it seems like dark days are looming.

The era of ‘sensible shoes’ might be behind us, as sports shoes are picking up pace. As per brokerage reports, sports and athleisure sales can grow anywhere between 13-15% compounded annual growth rate for the next 8-11 years — as dressing styles evolve. Sports and athleisure (S&A) footwear growth is structural, says Goldman Sachs. “Demand for the athleisure footwear segment is being driven by the rising acceptance for casual clothing at workplaces, a trend that started post-Covid,” says the Goldman Sachs report.

Cities like Amritsar, Varanasi, Madurai, Puri, Guruvayur, etc. are leveraging their unique culinary traditions and local fashion expertise to give tourists a taste of town beyond spirituality. India’s retail boom has reached its most key religious centres too. There is a Spykar store in Somnath, while Shirdi’s tourists can now shop for FabIndia kurtas. You can spot a Blackberrys outlet in Bodh Gaya, and a Zudio in Varanasi.

K-pop and K-dramas have ushered in a new trend of K-beauty regimens, which have picked up across India too over the last decade. But it’s not the only Asian beauty trend that’s making inroads in this fast-growing market. Japanese beauty companies are also making a beeline for the Indian market to cash in on the ‘natural ingredient’ trend.

Aviation watchdog DGCA has deferred the implementation of the revised flight duty norms for pilots that were to be effective from June 1, according to two civil aviation ministry officials. One of the officials on Tuesday said the revised norms have been deferred for some time to have wider consultations.

The demand for office spaces during the first quarter of 2024 has been strong, registering total leasing of 13.6 million square feet across the top six cities. It is a remarkable 35 per cent increase compared to the same period last year, according to professional services and investment management company Colliers.

With this, Maruti Suzuki will own an equity stake of over 6.44 per cent in the startup, the automaker informed stock exchanges on Saturday.

Inequality in India has skyrocketed since early 2000s, with the income and wealth share of top 1 per cent population rising to 22.6 per cent and 40.1 per cent, respectively, in 2022-23, according to a working paper. The paper titled 'Income and Wealth Inequality in India, 1922-2023: The Rise of the Billionaire Raj' said between 2014-15 and 2022-23, the rise of top-end inequality has been particularly pronounced in terms of wealth concentration.

Indian Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) industry on Wednesday pitched for the entities to get access to direct bank lending and classification as equities. At present, such vehicles can issue bonds or borrow from non-bank lenders or mutual funds, but are prohibited to borrow from banks, said the Indian REITs Association (IRA), a newly formed umbrella body for the five-year-old sector, which comprises four listed entities.

More people signed up for Prime Video in India than any other country outside of the US in recent years, Head of Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios Mike Hopkins has said. India is one of the key geographies for Amazon, Hopkins said on Tuesday at a star-studded Prime Video Presents event here that saw the announcement of the streamer's 2024 slate of 69 projects including shows, movies, documentaries and returning titles across languages and regions.

India's major cities are experiencing a housing boom in 2024. Sales have gone up by 20% in the first quarter so far (January 1 to March 15) with nearly 147,000 units sold across Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, and Pune, according to a report by NoBroker, a property search portal.According to the report, this positive trend is likely to have been led by a combination of factors. The Indian economy is on a strong growth trajectory, and the government's stable economic policies are boosting buyer confidence in the real estate market. People feel secure about investing in property, despite ongoing increases in property prices, according to the report.

India has probably seen its youngest millionaire in Ekagrah Rohan Murty - the four-month-old grandson of Infosys founder N.R. Narayana Murthy. The 77-year-old Infosys founder gifted shares to his grandson in an off-market transaction. With this, Narayana Murthy's holding in the IT bellwether fell to 0.36 per cent, or more than 1.51 crore shares.