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The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has proposed a hike in foreign direct investment limits in the broadcasting sectors, chiefly television and FM radio. The move follows the government’s desperation to bring in FDI follows to help bridge the balance of payments problem.
The Reserve Bank of India (link) did the predictable by holding on to rates at current levels in its quarterly monetary policy review. The repo rate has been retained at 7.25% and the reverse repo rate has been kept at 6.25%. Repo is when banks borrow from the RBI to meet temporary funds requirement and the reverse repo is when banks park surplus funds with the RBI.
Engineering and construction company Larsen & Toubro (link) has won a sizeable international order from the Arriyadh Development Authority (link), as part of a consortium to build a metro for the city of Riyadh, in Saudi Arabia. L&T said that it has got an order worth $1.4 billion or Rs 8,250 crore for design, construction and commissioning of a metro project.
The stock market verdict on Holcim’s restructuring of its India is an unequivocal thumbs-down. Both Ambuja Cements and ACC are down on Thursday, a day after the merger was announced. Ambuja Cements took a bigger hit and fell by 10.5% while ACC was down by 3%.
A merger of Ambuja Cements and ACC has been long speculated upon, since both are owned by the same parent company Holcim. On July 24, Ambuja Cements declared its results and also announced a rather complex restructuring to bring ACC into its fold.
The government announced on July 18 that it had issued an ordinance to give Sebi more powers against illegal collective investment schemes and to curb insider trading. The release went on to say that
A. Sebi would have powers to regulate any collective investment schemes with a corpus of Rs 100 crore or more,
B. Sebi could seek information, including call records, from anybody in connection with its investigations, and lastly
Oil & gas major Reliance Industries reported its June quarter results on Friday, 19 July 2013. Though its operating profit growth disappointed it could have been worse but for the refining business. The company’s net profit growth, however, was better than the Street’s expectation.
Bayer CropScience has decided to return surplus cash to shareholders through a buyback offer. The company, which makes crop chemicals, had sold its land at Thane (near Mumbai city) for a sum of Rs 1,250 crore. It had got Rs 520 crore as initial payment and had the final amount of Rs 730 crore was received in November 2012. During 2012-13, it reported a profit of Rs 1108 crore from the sale of its Thane land and Rs 82 crore from the sale of its Powai building.
NASDAQ listed Customers Bancorp Inc. is investing $51million or Rs 310 crore in the Malvinder Singh and Shivinder Singh promoted financial services company Religare Enterprises. The stake purchase comes at a time when a bunch of companies are applying for a banking license to be one of the new batch of private sector banks to enter the Indian market.
Anil Ambani group company Reliance Communications’ stock price jumped by 10.9% after it announced a tie-up with the Mukesh Ambani group telecom company Reliance Jio Infocomm. Reliance Communications will open up its optic fibre network to Reliance Jio which has a license for nationwide 4G services. A recent government decision means that it can also provide voice services by paying a one-time fee. Reliance Industries owns a majority stake in Reliance Jio.