Monday, November 2, 2015

Two New VPs to Strengthen Flipkart’s Technology Team

Leading e-commerce marketplace Flipkart has two new members onto its senior leadership team - Ravi Krishnaswamy as Vice President of Engineering for Infrastructure and Sharat Singh as Vice President of Engineering for Content.

Ravi Krishnaswamy comes with an extensive experience of over two decades in designing and developing enterprise and cloud scale platforms, as well as in leading teams through technical, engineering and management excellence.

Rs 200 Cr Karbonn Mobiles Manufacturing Plant To Come Up in Tirupati

In line with the government’s ‘Make in India’ initiative, domestic handset vendor Karbonn will invest Rs 200 crore to set up a manufacturing plant at Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh.

Last week, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had laid the foundation stone for a dedicated mobile handset and electronics manufacturing facility at Tirupati. Apart from Karbonn, the facility will house brands like Micromax, Celkon and Lava.

“We are setting up an integrated facility at Tirupati. The plant, which will be operational by September next year, will have a manufacturing capacity of 500,000 units a month,” Karbonn Chairman Sudhir Hasija told the media. He added that the company will invest Rs 200 crore in the facility and employ 2,000 people to start with.

“We currently have a monthly capacity of 1.8-2 million units and we are looking at scaling this up to 2.5 million by December next year,” he said. Over the next few years, the plan is to develop the entire manufacturing ecosystem in India along with component manufacturing, he added.

“By 2017, we will have miniscule imports as we will manufacture in India rather than just assembling here,” Hasija said.

Karbonn has a unit in Noida that manufactures feature phones. It is also setting up a facility in Haryana that is about thrice the size of the Noida plant. Global handset makers like Samsung and domestic players like Micromax and Spice have assembly units in India.

Recently, international players like Xiaomi, Gionee and Asus have announced assembly units in India in partnership with electronics major Foxconn in Andhra Pradesh.

Handset makers are looking to tap the multi-billion dollar opportunity in India, which is one of the fastest growing smartphone markets in the world. The Indian handset industry is poised to overtake the US as the second-largest market in next few years. According to research firm IDC, shipments in India grew 44 per cent year-on-year to 26.5 million units in April-June 2015 quarter.

Source: Agencies

Rs 3,000 cr Investment by Flipkart for Setting Up Fulfillment Centres

ECommerce marketplace Flipkart is going to invest more than Rs 3,000 crore to set up its nationwide fuilfillment network. The firm has spent $100 million in the past eight years in developing warehouse facilities.

Addressing reporters at the launch of the 17th and largest fulfillment centre of the company, at Gundlapochampally near Secunderabad, Flipkart COO and co-founder Binny Bansal said, “Flipkart will invest in setting up 80 to 100 fulfillment centres in 4-5 years in a bid to reach out to customers anywhere in just two days.”

He further said that Flipkart will be investing a couple of billions of dollars in logistics, and overall development.

“A public issue could be expected in the next five years,” Bansal said. Spread over 220,000 square feet, the new centre holds a massive storage capacity of 589,000 cubic feet. The centre has automated sorters with the ability to separate shipments based on pincodes. The Hyderabad facility will handle 240,000 units per day.

The centre also has a kilometre-long conveyer belt that reduces motion wastage by 75 per cent.

Source: Agencies

Brand India Sees 32% Jump, Moves up to Seventh Place in World’s Valuable Nation Brand

India has moved up one position to become the world's seventh most valued 'nation brand', with an increase of 32 per cent in its brand value to US$2.1 billion.

The US remains on the top with a valuation of $19.7 billion, followed by China and Germany at the second and the third positions respectively, as per the annual report on world's most valuable nation brands compiled by Brand Finance.

The UK is ranked 4th, Japan is at fifth position and France is sixth on the list. While India and France have moved up one position each since last year, all the top-five countries have retained their respective places.

However, the surge of 32 per cent in India's 'nation brand value' is the highest among all the top-20 countries on the list.

China has retained its second position despite a decline of one per cent in its brand value to $6.3 billion.

Brand Finance said it measures the strength and value of the nation brands of 100 leading countries using a method based on the royalty relief mechanism employed to value the world's largest companies.

The nation brand valuation is based on five year forecasts of sales of all brands in each nation and follows a complex process. The Gross domestic product (GDP) is used as a proxy for total revenues.

The report also said that India's 'Incredible India' slogan has worked well, while Germany suffered due to the Volkswagen crisis.

About the US, the report said it remains a powerful brand with an inviting business climate. "However its value comes in large part from the country's sheer economic scale... The US' world-leading higher education system and the soft power arising from its dominance of the music and entertainment industries are significant contributors too.

"This soft power will help the US to retain the most valuable nation brand for some time after China's seemingly imminent rise to become the world’s biggest economy," it added. The study further said that China's recent stock market turbulence and slowing growth will also extend the US' tenure of the top spot.

Among BRICS nations, India is the only country to have witnessed an increase in its brand value with all others -- Brazil, Russia, China and South Africa -- seeing a dip in their respective brand valuations.

India is the second most valued among these emerging economies after China, followed by Brazil, Russia and South Africa.

Source: Agencies

Snapdeal Proposes $100 Million R&D Investment for Next Three Years

E-marketplace major Snapdeal will spend US$100 million (Rs 640 crore) in the next three years on research and development as it looks to bring solutions to enrich online shopping experience as the competition hots up in the booming e-commerce industry in India.

The City-based firm, which has set up a centre in Bangalore, is investing heavily in new technologies related to multimedia and image in the coming quarters. "We are focused on building in-house technology solutions. We plan to spend about $100 million on RnD in the next three years. This includes the Multimedia Research Lab in Bangalore," said Snapdeal Chief Product Officer Anand Chandrasekaran.

As part of its innovation efforts, it has launched a new website, 'Findmystyle.in', where users will be able to discover products of choice while saving time and effort. Snapdeal had acquired a startup, Fashiate, in March this year for an undisclosed amount. The three co-founders and research scientists -- Gaurav Aggarwal, Nikhil Rasiwasia and Deepthi Singh -- are now a part of Snapdeal's Multimedia Research Lab that has developed Findmystyle.

"We are a technology company with a focus on building services and products that make lives of our consumers simpler and convenient. Findmystyle.in is powered by advanced computer vision and machine learning algorithms," said Chandrasekaran.

Founded in 2010, Snapdeal has over 40 million registered users and more than 1.5 lakh business sellers. The online marketplace raised about $1 billion last year, including $627 million from Japan's SoftBank and has been in news recently for raising another round of investment of about $500 million. Snapdeal counts eBay, Temasek, Myriad, Tybourne, Blackrock and Premji Invest among its investors.

Tata Sons Chairman Emeritus Ratan Tata also invested in the company in his personal capacity. It acquired Hyderabad-based mobile technology startup MartMobi (in May), payments and mobile recharge startup Freecharge (estimated at $400-450 million) as well as picked up stakes in digital financial services platform, RupeePower and logistics venture, GoJavas.

Source: Agencies

Friday, October 30, 2015

Startups Companies Drive Digital India at CeBIT 2015

The second edition of CeBIT India, organized by Hannover Milano Fairs, is considerably on lower key event with mediocre response particularly from participating companies compared to last year. This maybe mainly due to organizers for the CeBIT India event and the organizers of the BangaloreITE.Biz decided to part ways this year and have both the events held separately. However, CeBIT has its share of over 170 CXOs taking part in the three day event being at the Bangalore International Exhibition Centre. This year the event is focused on D1Conomy or Digital Economy that has got in a number of startups from across the country.

Now the state-government backed event Bangalore IT.Biz is likely to take place between December 8 and 10 in the city. And the event will have more focus on Make In India campaign.

While states such as Kerala, Uttar Pradesh and even Mizoram participated in the three day-event, he Karnataka government, which was a partner last year, stayed away. Last year, companies such as IBM, Mercedes-Benz and Vodafone were major crowd pullers.

“The state government were very clear that their event portfolio strategy is investment into Karnataka. But CeBIT is a market place, and we cannot tell the government that we will bring in thousands of global delegates .When partners work together, it should be towards the same direction and it is not the case this time,“ Mehul Lanvers Shah, MD, Hannover Milano Fairs India, said Shah.
The fair, being held at the Bangalore International Exhibition Centre, expects to have 10,000 trade visitors this time, a slight uptick from the 9,311 that attended last year. About 100 exhibitors, out of the total 400, are from Karnataka. “Karnataka is still the backbone of CeBIT and will remain that,“ adds Shah.

Delivering the keynote address at the event, Union IT secretary Ajay Kumar, said the Centre was planning to e-route all government transactions including receipts and payments as part of the Digital India initiative by the Prime Minister Modi.

Omkar Rai, director general, Software Technology Parks of India (STPI), said the organization has lined up a Rs 500 crore incubation fund to support startups over the next 4-5 years. “We are developing 8 lakh sq ft of incubation space, across Bengaluru, Chandigarh, Gurgaon and other cities,“ he said.