Corporate News – Industry trends

• India today set the stage for global car giants Toyota, Volkswagen

and Honda to unveil to the world their strategy and models for the

high-growth small-car market. The platform was the 10th Auto Expo

being held in the national capital (BS)

• Mukesh Ambani and Anand Jain promoted Mumbai SEZ Ltd has

suspended, for an indefinite period, its land acquisition for the Maha

Mumbai SEZ in coastal Raigad. The company may drop the project

altogether, as it was not able to acquire “a minimum of 1,000 hectares

of contiguous land” as mandated by the SEZ Act (BS)

• BHEL says private power producers, which were predominantly buying

equipment from Chinese companies, are turning to it in a big way;

BHEL Chairman and Managing Director B P Rao said the company had

bagged orders worth Rs 300bn between April 2009 and December

2009 for erecting 11,700 Mw of capacity. Of these, 11,200 Mw were

from independent power producers (IPPs), constituting about 94% of

the OB (BS)

• Pinched by rising raw material prices, fast moving consumer goods

(FMCG) companies, especially manufacturers of packaged foods and

soaps, may raise prices or reduce grammage per pack over the next

one or two quarters (BS)

• Tata Steel said sales from its Indian operations rose 73% in

December to 636,000 tonnes from a year earlier. India sales for the

December quarter rose 49% to 1.60 mn tonnes (BS)

• IVRCL Infrastructure and Projects Ltd have bagged orders worth

Rs 9.5 bn in transportation, water and irrigation, buildings and power

sectors. The company has a backlog of over Rs 10bn orders from oil

and gas sectors, with four projects under execution. The order book

position is at over Rs 220bn (BS)

• ACC Ltd has set up its 16th plant in the country at a cost of Rs 3700

mn. The fully automated cement grinding plant, a greenfield project,

has an annual capacity of 1.2 mn tonnes of cement. It is located in

Kudithini village, situated 25 km from Bellary in Karnataka (BS)

• L&T Infotech has bagged two important turnkey enterprise resource

planning projects for computerising the maintenance of rolling assets

of Indian Railways. The projects have been won against stiff

competition from major IT companies (BL)

• Maruti Suzuki said at the Auto Expo that it aimed to jack up its total

output by 50% to 1.5 mn units in five years; The strategy is for

defending its market share in India, where almost one in two cars sold

is a Maruti (BS)

• Mahindra & Mahindra has approached the Tamil Nadu government

for 253 acres to set up an integrated R&D and engineering centre at

Chennai. The proposed centre would amalgamate operations of the

company’s various existing R&D centres in different parts of the

country, including Nashik, Pune, Haridwar and Igatpuri (BS)

• Bharti Airtel, received the nod from Bangladesh’s telecom regulator

to purchase 70% stake in Warid Telecom and to invest US$300 mn in

the company (BS)

• ArcelorMittal’s proposal to invest Rs 300bn for setting up a steel

plant in north Karnataka has been granted in-principle approval; a

high-level clearance committee of the state government, chaired by

Chief Minister B S Yeddyurappa, cleared the proposal (BS)

• After a gap of three months, the domestic cement industry is likely

to come back to a double-digit growth trend in December, on the back

of robust demand as the peak construction period sets in (BS)

• Axis Bank launched the ‘Power Advantage Home Loan” scheme which

offers housing loans at a fixed interest rate of 8.25% per annum for

the first two years and a floating rate of interest thereafter (BS)