Wockhardt completes UK restructuring
Mumbai: Wockhardt UK Ltd, the British arm of the Indian drug company, has sold its plant at Luton, near London, to UK-based Bristol Laboratories, thereby completing its restructuring exercise in the UK. Wockhardt has brought two companies acquired by it - Wallis Laboratory and CP Pharmaceuticals - under a single entity, Wockhardt UK Ltd.

A company release states that the company is upgrading the Wales plant as it's largest overseas manufacturing base at an investment of £1 million. The upgraded Wales plant will eventually become a manufacturing base for Wockhardt's German subsidiary Esparma GmbH.

Acccording to the company, the sale of the Luton plant will reduce its operating costs and improve the bottomline. The UK contributes about 35 per cent of Wockhardt's consolidated revenue.
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Tata Power to sell power generation units to ACC
Mumbai: The Tata Power Company has said that it will sell two of its power generation units at Wadi, Karnataka, to Associated Cement Company Ltd for Rs238 crore.

TPC will seek the shareholders' approval for the sale through postal ballot, the company informed the stock exchanges. The two units with a combined capacity of 75 MW will now be used as captive generation units by ACC, a Tata Power official said.
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Reuters inaugurates Bangalore unit
Bangalore: Global news provider Reuters has opened its finance business data center here.

Having firmed up plans to triple its staff in India by end-2005, Reuters will move more editorial work to India. From the current 340 people on board, Reuters plans to increase the count to 1,200 employees in the given time frame.

The center will be one of the four key locations for the international news provider. The new facility would host data operations, news and business services. While some of the jobs have been migrated from other centres, new jobs have also been created.

While the initial focus would be on corporate earnings report and broker research in US companies, by early next year Reuters will also create an internal business services operation within the Bangalore facility. This will form part of Reuters Global Finance division and will process finance transactions for the Group in areas of general accounting services and cash applications.
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Rs.1,120 crore BSNL deal for Nokia
Mumbai: Nokia has been awarded a contract, worth Rs1,120 crore, by BSNL for the expansion of its GSM/EDGE and GPRS network in North India.

According to a Nokia release, the company will deploy four million lines across towns, cities, villages and all major State and national highways in Jammu & Kashmir, Haryana, Uttaranchal, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh (both east and west circles), Himachal Pradesh and Rajasthan.

As a part of the agreement that can be extended further, Nokia will supply both core and GSM/EDGE and GPRS radio network equipment, including base station subsystems, switching subsystems, intelligent network, GPRS core network, short message service system, multimedia messaging centre expansion and Nokia Download Solution.
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New recharge vouchers from Reliance
Mangalore: Reliance Infocomm has launched two new recharge vouchers of Rs199 and Rs165 denominations primarily for those customers whose primary need is to receive incoming calls or to recharge in smaller amounts.

The Rs199 recharge voucher with a talk time value of Rs56 allows the customer to receive unlimited incoming calls for 25 days. This voucher gives the customer sufficient talk time to make occasional outgoing calls.

The Rs165 recharge voucher with a talk time value of Rs75 is valid for 15 days, and the customer gets the benefit to "carry forward" the unused balance for the grace period of 15 days, the release said.
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BHEL bags Rs550 crore Rajasthan power plant order
New Delhi: Public sector engineering giant BHEL has received an order to set up a 330 MW gas-based power plant in Rajasthan.

A company release said Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd would build the combined cycle power plant for Rajasthan Vidyut Utpadan Nigam Ltd at Dholpur. The project is worth Rs550 crore and would be completed in 27 months.

Under the deal, BHEL would design, manufacture, supply and commission two 110 MW gas turbines with generators, matching heat recovery steam generators (HRSG) and one 110 MW steam turbine generator with associated auxiliaries.

The Dholpur CCPP is a natural gas-based plant with capability of firing from naphtha also.
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Sony's to launch Vaio Type X computer with 1,000 gigabytes of storage
Tokyo: Japan's Sony Corporation will begin selling a computer and home-server system in Japan with 1,000 gigabytes of hard-drive storage. The Vaio Type X, set to go on sale November 20, will sell for about USD 4700.

The company said that there are no plans to market the computer overseas.

The machine has six analog TV tuners that can record six channels at once for a week at 19 hours of programming a day, or five-and-a-half days of continuous recording. It also has a regular personal computer tuner for recording a seventh channel.

The oldest recordings are automatically deleted unless they are saved to make room for new recordings.
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World's thinnest desktop computer from Apple
New Delhi: Apple Computer has unveiled the world's thinnest desktop computer, iMac G5, featuring a G5 processor and a new design that integrates the computer right into a flat panel display.

The new line offers 17-inch or 20-inch active matrix widescreen LCDs and G5 processors running up to 1.8 GHz and prices begin at Rs87,800. The new product will be made available in the country by the end of this month.

The entire computer is built into the display and rests on an aluminium foot. All the I/O ports line up neatly along the rear right side for easy access and with optional AirPort Extreme and Bluetooth wireless modules.
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ICICI OneSource acquires Account Solutions Group
Mumbai: ICICI OneSource, the BPO unit of ICICI Bank, has announced its acquisition of New York-based Account Solutions Group.

Account Solutions Group (ASG), ICICI OneSource's fourth acquisition in three years, specialises in third party debt collections, and has clients that include three of the top 10 credit card issuers in the US, according to a statement from ICICI OneSource.

ASG currently operates two centres in Buffalo and New York and has over 500 employees. Its revenues as of end-December 2003 amounted to $25 million.

The acquisition will add late-stage collections capability to ICICI OneSource's service offering.

ASG will benefit greatly from ICICI OneSource's financial strength and expertise, and its client relationships with FTSE 100 and Fortune 500 companies will also help it grow aggressively from this point onwrds. There would be no change in the management structure of ASG, whose 500 employees would be retained.
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O2 launches its PDA mobile in India
Mumbai: The Singapore headquartered O2 Asia has launched its first product in India, the O2 XdaII, a PDA mobile. Priced at Rs35,999 excluding taxes, the PDA mobile will cost 14 per cent lower than the open market rate of Rs42,000, said a company release.

The O2 XdaII is equipped with Microsoft's integrated Windows Mobile operating system and applications such as Pocket Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and the like.

O2 will be setting up walk-in service centres in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai Bangalore and Hyderabad.
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TBWA India bags Bajaj Allianz creative account
Mumbai: Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance Co Ltd, one of the leading players in the private insurance segment, has announced the appointment of the Mumbai office of TBWA India as their creative agency.

TBWA India bagged the creative business of Bajaj Allianz Insurance Co Ltd, after a long-drawn multi-agency pitch that included FCB Ulka, McCann-Erickson, Ambience Publicis and incumbent agency, Contract.

TBWA sources said that it was use of 'Disruption' that helped the agency win this coveted piece of business. TBWA is aiming to 'disrupt' the language of insurance advertising in India.

Disruption is the proprietary strategic planning and creative development process of the worldwide TBWA network. Developed by its worldwide President and CEO, Jean-Marie Dru, and written about in two books (Disruption and Beyond Disruption, Wiley & Sons), Disruption has won accolades from some of the world's leading marketers, including Mars, Apple, Nissan, Nextel and Sony Playstation.
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Sri Lankan Air announces Dassera package
Hyderabad: Sri Lankan Airlines has announced a Dassera package, offering two nights of free stay in the island nation en route to the Far East or Europe. The package is valid up to October 31. Passengers would be put up in a special star category hotel on a twin-sharing basis, the airline has said in a press release here.

The airline will add 11 more flights to India from October 31, taking the total number to 77.
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