Naukariadda

The e-voting to finalise the liquidation process of six wound-up schemes of Franklin Mutual fund will take place in a week. The remote e-voting is scheduled to start on June 9 and it will end on June 11. Shivani Bazaz of ETMutualFunds.com reached out to Sanjay Sapre, President of Franklin Templeton India, to get an insight into the process. Edited interview.Finally, the e-voting date is here. Can you share the details of the process? How will investors go about the process? Our Trustees released the Notices on e-voting and Unitholder’s Meet on 28 May 2020 to investors in the six schemes under winding up. Due to the lockdown, voting will be conducted online and the Unitholder’s Meet via Video Conference (VC). We have partnered with “K Fintech” for the same. To be a part of both these activities, unitholders must have an email id / mobile number registered with us. Those investors who are yet to register their email IDs can do so upto 8 June 2020 on our website. Login credentials will be...

Credit risk funds have encountered a wave of redemptions in the wake of the Franklin Templeton fiasco. Battling a liquidity crunch, fund houses are resorting to inter-scheme transfers of bonds to repay investors. Here is why you should be concerned. Faced with redemptions, funds first tap their own cash reserves. When that tap runs dry, they look to sell off bonds in the secondary market to generate cash. However, in adverse market conditions, the secondary market doesn’t provide any succour—liquidity practically disappears, particularly for lower rated bonds. Most debt funds avoid selling off the more liquid, higher grade bonds in the portfolio. So as a last resort, funds may approach banks to borrow some money. Most fund houses avoid this route as it could entail a hit on the fund’s returns. The only way out for stressed funds to generate liquidity in such circumstances is to arrange for transfer of securities within their own schemes. Termed as inter-scheme transfer, it involves one...

India is staring at its first recession in 40 years. Despite the stock market appearing upbeat, economists are revising growth estimates downwards regularly. “Our current estimate for 2020-21 is -2.1%, assuming the lockdown will not be extended beyond 31 May. If it is extended, we will revise estimates,” says Sunil Sinha, Principal Economist, India Ratings. He is not alone. Crisil has also downgraded its growth forecast for 2020-21. “Due to the Covid pandemic, the first quarter of 2020-21 will suffer a staggering 25% contraction and despite some recovery in the second half, the Indian economy is expected to end the financial year with a 5% contraction,” says Dharmakirti Joshi, Chief Economist, Crisil. Unlike previous recessions—India has seen four since Independence—agriculture is expected to report normal growth this time. The overall numbers will be dragged down by the services sector and industries like manufacturing, mining, etc. One of the major factors contributing to the sorry s...

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Wuhan authorities said they found no new cases of “silent spreaders” for the first time in nearly two months as the city’s aggressive push to test its entire population appears to have succeeded in breaking hidden chains of transmission.Of the 60,000 people tested on Sunday, no cases of asymptomatic infections were found, said the Wuhan municipal health commission on Monday. In an ambitious effort to guard against a resurgence of cases, Wuhan is testing its entire 11 million population for the virus and has found some 200 asymptomatic cases in the past two weeks.The presence of infected people who show no outward signs of being sick but can nonetheless infect others has been an obstacle in worldwide efforts to contain the coronavirus, and a major reason why the pandemic spread so widely and quickly. In countries where testing remains inadequate, there is no way to detect such carriers and isolate them before they infect others.In identifying the city’s asymptomatic carriers, Wuhan’s te...

The first day of Unlock 1.0 saw a hike in cooking gas cylinder prices across the country.Following a global hike in June prices, the rates of LPG cylinders in India have been hiked with effect from today. For Delhi consumers, the prices are now up by Rs 11.50 a cylinder, according to a release by the IOC.After the latest adjustment, a (non-subsidised 14.2 kg Indane) cylinder will now cost Rs Rs 593 in Delhi, Rs 590.50 in Mumbai, Rs 606.50 in Chennai and Rs 616 in Kolkata.Prior to this raise, prices had been cut for three months on run.It is worth noting here that cylinder prices are revised at the start of every month depending on the global LPG benchmark rate and the rupee-dollar exchange rate. from Economic Times https://ift.tt/2ZTXKAV

NEW DELHI: ByteDance is setting up a second corporate entity in India, as the Chinese multinational internet technology company looks to deepen its roots in Asia’s third-largest economy, among its most active markets globally.The new entity, according to two sources with knowledge of the developments, is likely to provide Information Technology and IT-enabled services support to all of ByteDance’s platforms worldwide, including in India. It will also include working on content generated across its various platforms, issues that the startup has been facing across geographies. An email sent to ByteDance spokespersons in India, on Saturday evening, did not elicit any response till the time of going to press.The company, which commands a secondary private market valuation of about $110 billion, owns and operates popular short-form mobile video app TikTok and social media platform Helo apps. It also has content discovery platform Toutiao and Douyin, the Chinese twin of TikTok, as well as Xi...

By Alex Sazonov and Venus FengPetr Kellner’s push into China was meant to turbo-charge one of eastern Europe’s biggest fortunes. Instead, the Czech billionaire saw a listing of his consumer lender collapse, followed by a fight to contain the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.That has cost him $2.5 billion since January, with mounting questions about what’s next for his Asian expansion. In November, Kellner’s Home Credit NV scrapped a plan for a $1.5 billion initial public offering in Hong Kong after investors demanded a lower valuation. Now China’s slowing economy and shrinking consumer loans following strict lockdowns are adding to the woes for a company that has most of its loan book in that country.Kellner’s fortune, now at $10 billion, has dropped the most this year among the richest eastern Europeans outside of Russia, mostly because of a $1.5 billion plunge in the value of his stake in Home Credit. It’s now worth an estimated $2.8 billion, based on the performance of publicly tr...

New Delhi: Power Finance Corp (PFC) and REC Ltd have decided to offer 10-year loans to state distribution utilities at 9.5% for the next 60 days under the ₹90,000 crore liquidity infusion package as the Union cabinet is likely to consider relaxing working capital borrowing limits of power distribution companies this week.A senior government official said that PFC and REC have fixed interest rates under the liquidity package at 8.75% for three-year loans, 9% for five year loans, 9.25% for seven years and 9.5% for 10-year term loans. The interest rates will be valid for the next 60 days.Electricity distribution companies of 8-9 states including Maharashtra for, Telengana, Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Meghalaya, Jammu & Kashmir and Tamil Nadu have expressed interest in borrowing the loans from PFC and REC for about ₹60,000 crore loans and are likely to complete documentation in 7-10 days.Uttar Pradesh is likely to approach the two lenders for ₹20,000 crore, Tamil Nadu for ₹18,000 cr...

New Delhi: Economists just love graphs — and those graphs have never been as cool. As practitioners of the dismal science plot possible recovery paths of Covid-hit economies, they have added new shapes to plain vanilla V or U trajectories.There’s the Swoosh, a recovery pattern that looks like Nike’s famous logo. There’s the smoking pipe graph. There’s a W, Z and an L. Entirely predictably, because they can never agree on anything that’s important, different economists are championing different shapes, including in India.The Swoosh shape signifies that there will be sharp plunge, a longish stay below the trend line of growth and a gradual climb up. HDFC’s Abheek Barua thinks India is headed for Swoosh shape. But chief economic advisor KV Subramanian bets on a nice V — contraction, then sharp recovery. Barua bats for Swoosh by arguing that “lack of coordination among states, labour shortage and income declines” will hit both demand and supply .Subramanian sees a V by finding a parallel i...

Mumbai: Options traders are baking in a range of 9,037- 10,160 for the Nifty in the current expiry (June 25), with the bias on the upside. That’s an over 11 per cent range from Friday closing of 9,580.3.Both the levels are key as the lower one has acted as a strong support, while 10,160 is the March 13 high from where the market gapped down to 9,588 in the next trading session. It then went on to hit the multi-year low of 7,511 on March 24.Certain analysts, like Rohit Srivastava of IndiaCharts, are betting on the Nifty having a shy at 10,160 to fill the gap left on March 13. Others like Rajesh Palviya of Axis Securities expect the market to reverse after testing 10,000 levels, given the lockdown-induced “economic challenges” and head to 9,040 levels.The range is derived from the value of the 9,600 straddle (call and put of 9,600 strike) of 563 a share. The options expire on June 25. So long as the market trades within the range till expiry, the straddle seller makes money. The straddle...

NEW DELHI | MUMBAI: India is now in a community transmission phase, top public health experts have said, as the country starts a phased exit from a two-month lockdown they describe as “draconian.”In a joint statement to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, representatives of Indian Public Health Association (IPHA), Indian Association of Preventive and Social Medicine (IAPSM) & Indian Association of Epidemiologists said that the government should have consulted epidemiologists while formulating policies to tackle Covid-19.“Had the government of India consulted epidemiologists who had better grasp of disease transmission dynamics compared to modelers, it would have perhaps been better served,” the statement said. It pointed out that the government was primarily advised by “clinicians” and “academic epidemiologists” with limited field training and skills.“This draconian lockdown is probably in response to a modeling exercise from an influential institution which was a ‘worst-case simulation’...

Here's what to do if you find yourself in one of these dire situations.You are unlikely to meet your short-term goalIf your goal is just a year away and your investments have suffered heavy losses, or the property you were hoping to help finance the goal is not finding any buyer, or you dipped into this goal corpus for some other emergency, you may not be able to meet your goal.What to do...First, decide whether your goal is crucial or can be put off for a few years. If you can defer it, do so. If it is a critical goal, such as child’s education, you have three options. Either dip into another goal corpus to make up for the shortfall; reduce the goal value; or take a loan. If you opt for the first, make sure you replenish the amount withdrawn from the other goal corpus at the earliest. Go for the loan only if it’s for education, while a personal loan should be taken only as a last resort. You can also go for loans against assets. Use credit card if the amount is small and you have ...

By Bhupendra YadavMigrant workers provide the much-needed support to keep the wheels of economy moving. Nearly 80 million are working across our country currently. The sheer number of migrant workers has been the outcome of disproportionate economic development across different states in the post-Independence period. The government’s recently announced fiscal support measures for migrant workers include setting up of shelters where they are provided food and water. This has been done using a fund of Rs 11,000 crore, and through the provision of free supply of food and grains to 80 million workers over the next two months. Going ahead, through national portability of ration cards, the government would ensure that all migrants have access to subsidised food grains throughout the country.Finding employment opportunities amid the crisis would be a challenge for the migrant workers both in cities and back home in rural areas. Hence, the allocation of an additional sum of Rs 40,000 cr toward...

New Delhi: As the standoff with Indian troops was underway in Eastern Ladakh since early May, China constructed a new permanent road along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) that gives it access to a mountain area believed to be rich in natural deposits.The blacktopped road, designed to take on heavy transport vehicles, has come up right next to the LAC close to India’s Gogra post, in an area that satellite images suggest hold valuable natural resources like gold.Completed in barely three weeks, the road is just under four kilometres long and connects to a larger network that China has built along the LAC for the past few years. Satellite images show that less than 10 km away on the same road, the Chinese side has deployed heavy artillery and an armoured unit.Sources said that while a semi permanent track was present in the area, the Chinese side constructed two bridges and the blacktopped road at breakneck speed over the past weeks. While the road skirts along the LAC, it can be used to...

Mumbai: As the lockdown eases across the country, India could be faced with a shortage of private security guards, the Central Association of Private Security Industry (CAPSI) said. The industry employed 9 million people before Covid-19 struck but as retail outlets, malls, restaurants and movie theatres downed shutters, many returned to their villages.“We are preparing for post-Corona security challenges. There is a 35-40% shortage of private security guards pan-India,” said Kunwar Vikram Singh, chairman of CAPSI, which has 23,000 security agencies as members.The first wave of demand is coming from corporates, factories, hospitals, construction sites and vacant properties. In factories and offices, demand for trained guards at entry-exit points and other spaces has doubled due to mandatory Covid-related checks.The security industry has always been understaffed due to unequal and low wages. Currently, security guards get paid ₹5,000-16,000 a month depending on minimum wage rules in vari...

NEW DELHI | MUMBAI: India is now in a community transmission phase, top public health experts have said, as the country starts a phased exit from a two-month lockdown they describe as “draconian.”In a joint statement to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, representatives of Indian Public Health Association (IPHA), Indian Association of Preventive and Social Medicine (IAPSM) & Indian Association of Epidemiologists said that the government should have consulted epidemiologists while formulating policies to tackle Covid-19.“Had the government of India consulted epidemiologists who had better grasp of disease transmission dynamics compared to modelers, it would have perhaps been better served,” the statement said. It pointed out that the government was primarily advised by “clinicians” and “academic epidemiologists” with limited field training and skills.“This draconian lockdown is probably in response to a modeling exercise from an influential institution which was a ‘worst-case simulation’...

Mumbai: India’s airlines are sharply curtailing their fleet expansion plans as the Covid-19 pandemic saps demand for travel and pushes prospects of a recovery to next year.Carriers are likely to take delivery of not more than 25 planes for the year ending December, less than a third of what they were collectively scheduled to get, said several people aware of the matter. This includes 10-15 planes already inducted, they said.Market leader IndiGo will take the majority of the planes, although at a slower pace than its rate of one plane every week last year/ A handful of aircraft, including one Boeing 787 Dreamliner, will likely go to Vistara. AirAsia India, GoAir and SpiceJet may not take any fresh aircraft deliveries in 2020.India’s passenger airlines operate a combined fleet of 650 planes. Last year, Airbus and Boeing delivered about 70 planes to airlines and several more were leased by carriers.AirAsia India CEO Sunil Bhaskaran said the airline has frozen its expansion plans for this...

Mumbai: With no sales in April during the lockdown, automobile manufacturers Hyundai, Maruti Suzuki, BMW, Mahindra & Mahindra, Mercedes-Benz and Toyota recently announced digital vehicle-buying initiatives. However, online enquiries are yet to translate into major sales.Dealers are far from convinced about the digital strategy. While online enquiries have increased in the past few weeks, they’re not getting converted into sales, dealers said.“Web enquiries have overtaken walk-ins and are likely to continue post-Covid,” said Shashank Srivastava, ED, marketing & sales, Maruti Suzuki. “Conversion to sales continue to be highest for referrals on back of consumer loyalty.”Vinay Raghunath, head, auto practice, EY, said, “There is income uncertainty that is pushing consumers to postpone discretionary purchases.” Tarun Garg, director, sales & marketing, Hyundai, which launched its ‘Click to Buy’ platform last January, said despite online enquiries, it’s taking longer for consumers ...

New Delhi: The disruption that Covid-19 has brought about will trigger a boom in the market for Internet of Things, or connected technologies, say industry executives and analysts. They add that companies such as Infosys, Tata Communications, ThoughtWorks, Citius Tech and Hero Electronics are betting on these opportunities. “IoT has always existed as an automation tool but this disruption will enhance adoption of IoT just like it did for collaborative virtual meeting platforms,” said Alok Bhardiya, head (IoT Business Unit), Tata Communications.First, there was a dip. “The cellular-based IoT market is expected to have a YoY decline of 4.4% by end of CY2020,” said Apalak Ghosh, industry manager for digital transformation at market research and analysis firm Frost & Sullivan. He, however, expects the market to start reviving from 2021 and post as much as 22% growth the following year.NEW USE CASESRestaurants may have to attest to food quality in real time, said Selvakumar Natesan, the...

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MUMBAI: The Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) is considering an unprecedented one-time listing window for existing unlisted non-convertible debentures to ease stress at various mutual funds. Two people familiar with the matter said that mutual funds holding illiquid, lower-rated securities would be able to use this opportunity to offload them to buyers. The rise in risk aversion after the Covid-19 lockdown had made it very difficult for funds to sell these securities without incurring huge losses. The capital market regulator told the mutual fund industry last week in a letter to ask issuing companies whether they are interested in listing these NCDs. There are about 128 such issuing companies, the Sebi letter says, and they include marquee names like Tata Sons, ONGC Petro Additions, Adani Rail Infra, KKR India Financial Services and Hero Solar Energy. According to industry estimates, debt mutual fund schemes held unlisted NCDs worth Rs 41,500 crore on March 31.Email querie...

KOLKATA: Market researchers International Data Corporation (IDC) and Counterpoint Research have downward revised their outlook for the Indian smartphone market estimating sales will decline by 13-15% due to Covid-19, making it the first year of decline ever.The trackers said this is going to be due to recent spate of job and salary cuts whereby consumers will postpone purchases, companies unable to ramp up production impacting supply of models, and the recent increase in GST on smartphones from 12-18% making models pricier.IDC has now projected the smartphone market in India could hit as low as 130 million handsets as compared to earlier estimate of 140 million. Counterpoint has just revised its outlook pegging the industry at 137 million from earlier outlook of 142 million.Last year, India sold 154-158 million smartphones and before Covid, high single digit growth was likely this year.In case of feature phones, the decline in sales is estimated to be a steep 42% from 130 million hands...

By Peter BakerWith a nation on edge, ravaged by disease, hammered by economic collapse, divided over lockdowns and even face masks and now convulsed once again by race, President Donald Trump’s first instinct has been to look for someone to fight.Over the last week, America reeled from 100,000 pandemic deaths, 40 million people out of work and cities in flames over a brutal police killing of a subdued black man. But Trump was on the attack against China, the World Health Organization, Big Tech, former President Barack Obama, a cable television host and the mayor of a riot-torn city.While other presidents seek to cool the situation in tinderbox moments like this, Trump plays with matches. He roars into any melee he finds, encouraging street uprisings against public health measures advanced by his own government, hurling made-up murder charges against a critic, accusing his predecessor of unspecified crimes, vowing to crack down on a social media company that angered him and then seeming...

By Alexander WeberModern economies will change forever after the coronavirus pandemic passes if some radical thinkers get their way.Governments have already cast aside dogmas at least temporarily -- such as Germany’s “black zero” balanced budgets -- to protect companies and jobs in the deepest peacetime recession in almost a century.Yet moves such as governments mailing checks to citizens and the U.K. administration borrowing direct from the Bank of England also offer a glimpse of different ways of running things in the longer-term.“Every crisis is an opportunity to rethink priorities,” said Maria Demertzis, deputy director of the Bruegel think tank in Brussels. “The scale and the type of the crisis mean that, by definition, the tools we’re operating under aren’t sufficient.”76117648Change won’t be easy. The global financial meltdown a decade ago led to similar cries, mostly to no avail besides stricter rules on banks that were later watered down. Here are some of the ideas -- often ol...

NEW DELHI: Covid-19 is testing the business models of the best of startups. Thousands of these ventures are trying to cope and survive in a situation they never planned for. Some are finding ways to navigate the storm, but for many this Black Swan event could be their Swan Song. In an e-mail interaction, Rajan Anandan, managing director, Sequoia Capital India, discusses the new normal, what startups should focus on, why ventures in edtech, gaming, healthcare and even robotics could succeed and more. Edited excerpts:What will be the new normal now?The current crisis – humanitarian, healthcare and economic - is at a global scale and magnitude that hasn’t been seen in over a hundred years. And the level of uncertainty we are facing in all aspects of life will continue for some time. In India, especially, we are yet to hit the peak of the crisis. So to draw any conclusions about the ‘new normal’ at this stage, will be premature.But one thing we can expect is nothing will be quite the same....