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Check out the speed. After charting out a high-octane growth curve, India Inc is changing gears and getting into a diversification mode, spotting the booming business domains. In fact, in an aggressive hunt for growth areas, many Indian companies of various sizes and scales have made a serious attempt to join the bandwagon and branch out to new businesses.
Friday, January 31, 2014
USUAL REVISION Govt revises FY13 GDP growth to 4.5% from 5%
US downgrades India's aviation safety ranking
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AS officer's son tipped to be Microsoft's global CEO Hyderabad-Born 46-Year-Old Is A 22-Yr MS 'Insider'
Washington/Bangalore/New Delhi/Hyderabad: Hyderabad -born Satya Nadella, son of an IAS officer who was secretary to former Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao, is being tipped strongly to become chief executive of Microsoft, according to several news outlets citing sources familiar with deliberations on the matter.
Nadella, 46, is a 22-year Microsoft insider who now heads the company’s $20-billion cloud and enterprise group. If the Microsoft board, which has been searching for a successor to current CEO Steve Ballmer for nearly five months, goes through with his appointment, he will be the topranked chief executive of Indian-origin, comfortably overtaking Indra Nooyi of Pepsico. An announcement is expected as early as Friday.
Microsoft is currently the world’s fourth-largest company by market cap ($312 billion) after Apple ($450bn), Exxon Mobil ($405bn) and Google ($394bn); Pepsico’s is way behind at $124bn.
Nadella grew up in Hyderabad. His father, B N Yugandhar, went on to become a Planning Commission member, and friends recollect him as “a jholawala, a man with an NGO mindset.”
Nadella studied at the Hyderabad Public School, Begumpet, the alma mater of other global business bigwigs like Shantanu Narayen, CEO of Adobe Systems, and Prem Watsa, chairman and CEO of Fairfax Financial Holdings, who’s known as Canada’s Warren Buffet. He did his engineering from Manipal University between 1984 and 1988, and then went to the US where he received a degree in computer science and an MBA.
WINDOWS OPEN FOR SATYA NADELLA
Born in 1967 in Hyderabad, studied at Hyderabad Public School, Begumpet
Engineering in electronics and communication from Manipal University
MS in computer science from University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
MBA from University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business
Started his tech career at Sun Microsystems, joined Microsoft Corporation in February 1992
First MS assignment was as program manager for Windows Developer Relations Group
Now, executive VP, cloud and enterprise, a $20-billion business at the $78-billion Microsoft Nadella’s strength is the variety of roles he’s played in MS, his weakness is in consumer space
Satya Nadella worked briefly with Sun Microsystems, before joining Microsoft in 1992. At Microsoft, he has worked in a variety of businesses, from core enterprise products to online services including Bing, MSN and the cloud platform Azure.
He is part of a large contingent of Indians, numbering in the thousands, who joined Microsoft in the 1990s, leading former honcho Bill Gates to look at India as both a research hub and a market after he recognized the country's potential on both counts. Microsoft’s Hyderabad campus is now the company's largest non-US-base. The company has nearly 5,000 employees in India out of its 100,000-strong workforce.
The variety of roles Nadella has played is now proving to be his strength. Ashlee Vance of Bloomberg BusinessWeek writes that Nadella is one of the most impressive members of the new bunch of senior executives he has seen at Microsoft. “Crucially, he’s more or less Microsoft’s cloud master and has a firm handle on what it takes to run Bing, Office365, Skype, and Xbox Live. Nadella is also well-liked and respected throughout the industry. And he’s enough of a different character from Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates to inject some new life into the company,” he says.
That’s something Microsoft desperately needs. Once the undisputed king of the computing world, the company has lost a lot of ground over the past decade to companies like Google and Apple on account of its failure to anticipate the revolutionary changes that the internet and mobile devices have been ringing in.
The company is now making moves away from its roots as a software maker to focus on hardware and internetbased services. In some areas it has made good progress, such as the cloud platform Azure and to a lesser extent the cloud-based office productivity tools. But in the crucial area of mobile devices, Nadella has a huge task on his hands, and it’s not an area he has much experience with. Less than 2% of smartphones are Windows-based.
Microsoft acquired Nokia’s mobile business recently to try and do a leapfrog in this space. Patrick Moorhead, president at Moor Insights & Strategy and a veteran of the computer industry, says Nadella may face a challenging time in fixing Microsoft's problems in the consumer space.
“Nadella has a lot of experience, but not as much as someone who typically runs a company of the size of Microsoft. He has spent most of his time in the enterprise space, so I think he would need a very strong lieutenant who gets the consumer market,” Moorhead told TOI.
Vance appears to agree: “What Nadella is not is the radical agent of change or the inspirational visionary that some investors and outsiders have been hoping for. He seems likely to keep pushing on Microsoft’s data center-focused cloud journey and unlikely to take any drastic measures around consumer products.”
If indeed Nadella is the chosen one, everybody would be keenly watching to see the steps he takes to get back the consumer mindshare that Microsoft has lost to Apple and Google.
Friday, January 10, 2014
Industrial output falls 2.1% in Nov
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Food prices fall globally, but keep rising in India
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AAP aims at 1 crore members by Jan 26
New Delhi: The AAP launched a massive volunteer recruitment drive on Friday. Chief minister Arvind Kejriwal who is also the party convener, said that the party is aiming at induction of at least one crore people by January 26. He also said that the membership fee of Rs 10 has now been waived off completely.
Within three hours of announcing this, almost 50,000 people had joined AAP across India. "The option of joining the party online has been given this time and 47,500 people became members through online registration. Another 1,950 became members through the phone service," said party sources. Till January 7, the party had a membership of almost 2 lakh and a volunteer base of just over 7 lakh. More than half of these people joined the party after the declaration of assembly election results in Delhi on December 8 last year. "Till December 8, the party had 27,632 members and 2.47 lakh volunteers. In the one month after declaration of results, 1.65 lakh people joined as members and another 4.64 lakh as volunteers. We are quite confident of touching the one crore mark in the next few weeks," said sources. The 'mein bhi aam aadmi' drive was launched on Wednesday by Kejriwal with the release of a phone number on which people can register. Senior party member Gopal Rai said that people could register by either calling on this number or messaging on it. Even missed calls on the number would be responded to but only one member will be accepted on one mobile number. "Other than the phone number, people can register online. The form is available on the party website and it can be downloaded and copied. Volunteers can distribute these forms by going door to door or organizing camps. Those who do not have mobile phones can join the party by giving their voter ID information but that will start after January 17," said Rai.
The party was almost entirely dependent on its volunteers and members for its campaign in Delhi. With limited funds and the need to involve as many people in its movement as possible, the party is aiming to induct several lakhs before the Lok Sabha elections. It did away with the membership fee while also admitting that it was not administratively equipped to deal with this influx of people.
Tuesday, January 7, 2014
ON THE RISE AGAIN India Inc earnings to hit six-quarter high in Q3
India Inc is expected to post its best earnings growth in six quarters in the October-December (third) quarter of the current financial year on the back of a strong performance by export-oriented sectors and a low base.
Profit after tax (PAT) of companies on the benchmark sensex is set to increase 13% year-on-year (y-o-y) to around Rs 55,000 crore during the quarter, estimates made by leading brokerages showed. PAT growth is expected to accelerate to 16% y-o-y in the fourth quarter (January-March) as earnings slowly move up to levels seen during the boom years. Though India Inc's PAT growth will still be lower than the heady 25%-plus increase seen between 2002-03 and 2007-08, it would be closer to the average of the past 10 years. While growth was concentrated among a few sectors in the previous quarters, several sectors are expected to register gradual improvement in growth rates from the third quarter. "Downgrades to sensex EPS (earnings per share) have taken a breather," an analyst at Motilal Oswal Securities (MOSL) said.
The growth trend emerging from the quarterly results suggest that the worst may be over for India Inc in terms of earnings. After a 3% y-o-y degrowth in PAT in the quarter ending June 2013, profits at 143 companies covered by MOSL grew 8% y-o-y in the following quarter.
PAT growth is expected to be 10% y-o-y for these firms during the quarter ending December 2013. But this is still lower than the long-term average growth of 14%. Only around a third of these firms are expected to report a decline in PAT — the lowest level in 11 quarters.
"The worst is over for most of the sectors. The earnings are likely to be above expectations, especially in IT and commodity-related businesses," said Vikram Dhawan, director, Equentis Capital. Deven R Choksey, MD, KR Choksey Shares and Securities, said, "The earnings for the third quarter will be better."
Telecom, cement and automobiles sectors are expected to report growth after several quarters of decline. In fact, telecom, cement, media, real estate and retail are likely to emerge as the sectors logging the highest growth.
Sensex firms are likely to report 13% y-o-y increase in sales to around Rs 5 lakh crore.
Citizens can call for blood from today Free Hi-Tech Ambulances To Be Launched In A Month
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Sunday, January 5, 2014
State’s population grew 16% in 2001-11, cars 158% But Experts Say Better Public Transport Crucial Before Any Deterrents
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