SAIL gears up for competition with Rs37,000-cr expansion plan
New Delhi: With Mittal Steel confirming its India plans and Posco moving ahead with its Orissa project, Steel Authority of India (SAIL) has hiked its corporate expansion plan of around Rs35,000 crore to Rs37,000 crore. It has also to implement its expansion process in 3 years, instead of 5 yrs as planned earlier to enable it to prepare for the market two to three years before the Posco or Mittal capacity comes up.

Sail plans to expand its production capacity from the current annual level of around 14.5 million tonnes to around 22.5 million tonnes over the next 5 years with an investment of Rs9,000 crore at Bokaro Steel Plant, Rs6,340 crore at Bhilai Steel Plant, Rs4,590 crore at Rourkela Steel Plant and Rs2,840 crore at Durgapur Steel Plant. It has also planned a major investment of around Rs9,600 crore in IISCO, and Rs1,553 crore in Salem Steel Plant.
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ONGC to shelve plans in Rajasthan
New Delhi: Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) has shelved plans to set up a 7.5 million tonnes per annum wellhead refinery in Barmer region and is trying to work out a sales and long-term crude supply agreement between Mangalore Refinery Petrochemicals (MRPL) and Cairn Energy for Rajasthan crude oil.
ONGC, on behalf of its subsidiary MRPL, has sought certain concessions including a discount of $4-5 a barrel on Cairn's Rajasthan crude oil. The oil major has argued that without concessions it was uneconomical to transport oil from Rajasthan to MRPL's refinery.

Cairn may have asked for an international price for the 1.5-lakh barrels per day expected from end of 2008. ONGC, on the other hand, is stating that the Rs2,000 crore, which the company would be putting in to build a pipeline for crude transportation, needs to be compensated through discounts. ONGC has a 30 per cent stake in an oil and gas block in Rajasthan, while British energy major Cairn Energy holds the remaining stake and operatorship.
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Areva signs pact to buy Ritz
Mumbai: Areva T&D has entered into a pact with the Ritz group, setting forth the legal and financial terms for the acquisition of the group's high-voltage instrument transformers activities. Ritz High Voltage is a global leader in instrument transformers with annual sales of euro 50 million and 500 employees. A leading player in carbon-dioxide-free power generation and electricity transmission and distribution, the present deal is in line with Areva T&D's targeted acquisition strategy to reinforce its each product line, the company said.
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Aurobindo Pharma acquires US firm
Mumbai: Aurobindo Pharma Ltd has announced that it has acquired a US FDA compliant cGMP facility spread over 20 acres of land located in Princeton Life Sciences Corridor in New Jersey State. The campus has 1,00,000 square feet of fully integrated state of the art R&D, formulation manufacturing and distribution facilities with potential for future expansion. This facility will serve as the company's US head quarters.
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Panacea Biotec in pact with Indonesian company
Mumbai: Panacea Biotec has entered into a commercial agreement with P T Bio Farma, Indonesia for an addition in the company's vaccine portfolio.

A formal meeting for signing of the said agreement is scheduled to be held on July 11, 2006 at New Delhi.
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Deccan Aviation extends financial year
Mumbai: Deccan Aviation's board of directors have decided to extend the financial year 2005-2006, i.e., April 01, 2005 to March 31, 2006 by 3 months to close on June 30, 2006. Consequently, the company's financial year 2005-2006 shall be for a period of 15 months from April 01, 2005 to June 30, 2006.

Henceforth the financial year of the company shall commence on July 01 and end on June 30, and as a consequence, the financial year 2006-2007 will commence on July 01, 2006 and ends on June 30, 2007 .
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Satyam Computer Q1 results on July 21
Mumbai: Satyam Computer Services has informed the BSE that a meeting of the board of directors will be held on July 21 to consider the audited financial results of the company for the first quarter ended June 30, 2006.
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India adds 3.2 m GSM subscribers in June
New Delhi: India added 3.2 million new GSM subscribers in June, according to the Cellular Operators' Association, which represents India's nine GSM carriers. The June additions have taken the country's GSM customer base to 78.5 million.
The mobile user base has now risen to 101.8 million.

Bharat Sanchar Nigam added more than 0.3 million subscribers in June, raising its GSM user base to nearly 18.3 million while Bharti Airtel, added more than 1.2 million subscribers, hiking its user base to about 23.1 million customers.

Hutchison Essar Telecom Ltd., the Indian wireless operation of Hong Kong's Hutchison Telecommunications International Ltd., added nearly 0.8 million new users in June. The firm's subscriber base stood at about 17.5 million customers.
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Belair logs out of B'lore: shuts call centre, sacks staff
Bangalore: Call centre firm Belair Communications headquartered in UK has shut down its captive call centre in Bangalore and terminated the services of its 93 employees without compensating them.

According to the Union for ITES (IT-enabled services) professionals (UNITES), Belair Communications India decided to cease its India operations last month by handing over pink slips to its entire staff without notice.

The Indian subsidiary of the British firm was registered with the state-owned Software Technology Parks of India (STPI) as an export unit and began its operations a year ago to provide transaction processing and call centre services to its customers back home.

Last month British energy firm Powergen relocated about 1,000 jobs from India to achieve economies of scale by cost cutting. Similarly, the US-based Apple Computer shut its 20-member captive call centre in June. Another US data infrastructure product vendor - Pervasive Software too followed suit, citing high cost of operations in Bangalore.
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Hindustan Zinc raises metal prices
Mumbai: Hindustan Zinc Ltd. part of the London-listed Vedanta Resources Plc and India's top zinc producer has raised its product prices for the second time this week. The company raised the cost of zinc to Rs179,400 per tonne, up 1.01 percent from Rs177,600, according to a company statement.

The statement also said lead would now cost Rs54,100 a tonne, up 0.56 percent from Rs53,800 earlier.
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