Vodafone Plc announced that Piramal Healthcare, Ajay Piramal’s group flagship, will pay $640 million or about Rs 2,900 crore to acquire a 5.5% stake in Vodafone Essar. This will help raise cash for Vodafone as well as allow it to remain compliant with India’s foreign direct investment rules for the telecom sector, which mandate a 74% foreign shareholding cap.

BEML, a state-owned company which makes heavy equipment used in mining and infrastructure projects, announced that it has entered the Thai market. It has appointed a distributor Paragon Machinery as its distributor in the country and Paragon will market BEML products –such as loaders, excavators, dump trucks, and dozers in Thailand and neighbouring countries such as Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia.

Glenmark Pharmaceuticals Ltd announced that a molecule under development in its labs has cleared the first phase of human clinical trials. Glenmark Pharmaceuticals S.A, a subsidiary of Glenmark, conducted the trials in the UK and said that the drug has been well tolerated with a good pharmacokinetic profile. Pharmacokinetics refers to how the body behaves when a drug enters the blood stream.

Engineering company Larsen & Toubro has got an Rs 1,210 crore order to set up a 13 power sub-stations in Qatar. Its power and transmission division has got this order which has to be executed between 18 and 26 months. This is a relatively small order compared to its existing book of Rs 130,217 crore worth of orders in hand.