A V Birla Group too to bid for CMC
Mumbai: A V Birla group too has joined the fray to a stake in the state-owned company, CMC, where the government has announced intention to divest 57.3 per cent stake.

The group, which recently made its foray in the infotech sector with the acquisition of PSI Data Systems has submitted an expression of interest and is evaluating the options before it. Others in the fray include the Tata group, the Reliance group and Wipro. Even US based hardware giant Hewlett-Packard is said to be interested in CMC.

CMC is the largest PSU in the Indian infotech industry, and recorded a net profit of Rs 24.46 crore in 2000-01 on sales of Rs 534 crore.
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Philips Software to hire more
Mumbai: Philips Electronics NV plans to increase the staff by 30 per cent at its Indian software subsidiary in Bangalore. The company is targeting an employee strength of about 1,000 by 2004 from around 750 currently, according to Chief Executive Officer Bob Hoekstra, but most of the employee additions would be made in 2001.

Philips Software develops and supplies software for the electronic giants worldwide operations which works in six areas -- consumer electronics, semiconductors, medical systems, research, industrial technology and components.

Philips had earlier planned to increase its employee strength by 50 per cent, but had to restrict itself due to the economic slowdown.
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Bharti-Whirlpool customer support tie-up
Kolkata: Bharti groups Spice Telecom, Kolkata's leading cellular service brand, has joined hands with Whirlpool, the home appliances company, to implement a customer support system which will reduce response time to four hours. This will be the countrys first convergent customer support system, where Whirlpool customer complaints would be routed through Spice Telecoms call centres to the nearest Whirlpool service engineers through SMS, so as to provide prompt customer service.

The pilot project at Kolkata would be extended to other cities in a tie up with other cellular operators, according to Whirlpool.
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Nortel to invest 4 billion dollars in India, hire more
New Delhi: Canadian telecom equipment major Nortel Networks plans to invest 4 billion dollars in India over the next five years, and hire between 100 to 200 people in one year.

The company sees a high potential for the growth of wireless and optical networks in India, and expects Asia to fuel its growth worldwide. It expects the demand for wireless and optical networks to be higher in Asia than in Europe and the US over the next few years.

Nortel had earlier put on hold all its investment plans in India including that for a research and development facility, last year.
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Dual fuel taxi from Telco
Pune : Telco launched a new dual fuelled car which runs on both petrol and compressed natural gas , the 1400 cc Indicab , aimed at the Mumbai and Delhi taxi markets. The car has two CNG tanks of 22 and 50 litres and a five-litre petrol tank for contingencies.

The car is priced at Rs 3.3 lakh in Delhi, about Rs 25,000 above the pure petrol version, and to give about 14.3 kilometres for every kilo of CNG. The CNG kits are sourced from the Italian company, Lendi Renzo and the cylinders from Faber. The company rolled out the first batch of 250 of these vehicles out of its plant at Pune.
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ICICI, IDBI grapple with asset-liability gap
Mumbai: Both ICICI and the Industrial Development Bank of India (IDBI) are facing problems due to asset-liability mismatches. Both institutions are in trouble because they have borrowed short-term funds and are lending long term ones, and face the prospect of not being able to meet their liabilities, although senior officials of these institutions see nothing amiss in a falling interest rate regime.

Thus, ICICI has assets of Rs 19,679 crore in the less-than-one-year category, as against a comparable maturity liability of Rs 26,352 crore, leaving a gap of Rs 6,673 crore. IDBI's assets in this category are to the tune of Rs 24,643 crore; while the comparable maturity liability is at Rs 31,381 crore, leaving a gap of Rs 6,738 crore.

In the one to three year bracket, ICICI is running a mismatch of over Rs 5,000 crore (total assets: Rs 17,084 crore; total liabilities: Rs 22,152 crore). In the case of IDBI, the figure is close to Rs 17,000 crore (total assets: Rs 38,878 crore; total liabilities: Rs 55,537 crore).

ICICI proposes to augment its funds position by tapping the retail market, since most banks have already reached the limits of their exposure with ICICI. ICICI will thus be raising Rs 25,000 crore this financial year, of which Rs 6,000 crore would be from individual investors, Rs 10,000 crore from semi-retail investors and Rs 9,000 crore from provident funds, regional rural banks, corporate bodies, public trusts and insurance companies.
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British Gas buys Pipavav LNG port
New Delhi: British Gas has bought over the Pipavav LNG Port venture promoted by the Sea King group, for Rs 375 crore.

As per the deal, British Gas is taking over 100 per cent equity stake held by the Gandhis-promoted Sea King Infrastructure in the 5.3 million tonnes capacity Pipavav LNG project coming up close to the Gujarat Pipavav Port.

British Gas is expected to raise the capacity to 10 million tonnes in phases, with a total investment of 850 million dollars. The first phase of the terminal is expected to be completed within three years.

British Gas already has a few other operations in India, such as its joint ventures Mahanagar Gas in Mumbai with GAIL and the Maharashtra government, and Gujarat Gas.

The Sea King group plans to use the proceeds of the sale for its ambitious special economic zone project, Positra, which has big names like Sumitomo Corporation of Japan and Jurong Town Corporation of Singapore as equity partners.
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UTI to scale down exposure in equities
Kolkata: Unit Trust of India (UTI) proposes to scale down its exposure in equity of companies, where it has classified companies under three broad categories, for three distinct kind of approaches of disinvesting. These three categories included blue chip companies with large market capitalization, smaller companies that were performing well, but whose market capitalization was not too large, and companies that were under performing.

UTI would be transferring its holding in blue chip companies to Life Insurance Corporation of India ain stages, while in the second category it would give promoters the first right to buy back stocks of their own companies. With the third group, it intends to go in for open market sale of shares of firms, even at the risk of de-stabilising the markets for those shares.

For UTI, this would help it to scale down its huge exposure in equities while the last one would help bringing managements of public companies in line. The Rs 12,800 crore US-64 scheme has a 70 per cent exposure in equities spread over 1,100 companies.

The promoters in the second category of companies could follow the creeping acquisition route to purchase shares from UTI where the funds stake was below five per cent, or go for an open offer.
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