Vijay Mallya Resigns as United Spirits Chairman; Director of Royal Challengers Sports and Four Seasons Wines

In a sweetheart deal, flamboyant businessman Vijay Mallya today quit as Chairman of United Spirits after its new majority owner Diageo agreed to pay Rs 515 crore and absolve him of all liabilities over alleged financial lapses at the company founded by his family. He has also resigned from his position as a director of Royal Challengers Sports and Four Seasons Wines.

Mallya, who along with his group firms is fighting 'wilful defaulter' tags given by various lenders in relation to loans taken by long-defunct Kingfisher Airlines, said he would now "spend more time in England" closer to his children.

For son Sidhharth also, he has managed a sweetheart deal, with Diageo agreeing to retain him as Director of the USL Group firm that runs the RCB cricket team of IPL cricket tournament for at least two years.

Mallya himself has agreed to resign from boards of all USL group firms, including as Chairman and non-executive director of United Spirits Ltd (USL). He would become 'founder emeritus' of USL and Chief Mentor of RCB.

Announcing his resignation, Mallya said, "The time has now come for me to move on and end all the publicised allegations and uncertainties about my relationship with Diageo and USL.

"I am pleased to have been able to agree terms with Diageo and USL. The agreement we have reached secures my family legacy."

Giving details of the agreement, Diageo later said in a statement that Mallya will have no "personal liability" to the UK-based company in relation to the findings of the alleged financial irregularities at the company that had triggered an acrimonious fight between them.

These allegations, which surfaced after an internal inquiry, related to the period before Diageo acquired controlling stake in USL from the Mallya family in a multi- billion dollar deal.

Diageo said it has "agreed to pay US$75 million to Mallya in consideration for his resignation and termination of his appointment and governance rights and his relinquishing of the rights and benefits attached to his position as Chairman and non-executive director", among other factors.

Diageo said it will pay US$40 million of this amount immediately with the balance being payable in equal instalments over five years.

The payment is also for "his agreement to five-year global non-compete (excluding the UK), non-interference, non-solicitation and standstill undertakings, and his agreement that he and his affiliates will not pursue any claims against Diageo, USL and their affiliates"

Indian Industry Welcomes IT Integration and Deployment of e-Services in Indian Railways

NASSCOM welcomes the technology focused initiatives that were announced as a part of Suresh Prabhu’s Railway Budget 2016. We are glad to note that the government is walking the talk on IT integration and deployment of e-services, to achieve the dream of Digital India. Aimed at showcasing a positive future for railways in India; the inclusion of GPS based digital displays in coaches, and the setting up Wi-Fi internet in 100 station this year, are initiatives that will not only streamline services in the railways, but also benefit customers across the board.  The minister has also announced the utilization of drones for remote monitoring of on-going projects, which is an imperative to ensure timely completion of projects. With the railways, ready to take the next leap in setting high speed rail networks, these announcements are testimony to the centre’s commitment towards the upgradation of services; giving the transportation lifeline of India its due.

Additionally, the setting aside of Rs.50 crore for providing innovation grants to employees, start-ups and businesses is an holistic and commendable approach towards scaling up the innovation and entrepreneurial landscape in the railway sector.

Anuj Puri, Chairman & Country Head, JLL India, says “The railway minister Suresh Prabhu’s announcement today on redevelopment of 400 stations through the private-public partnership (PPP) model is a very progressive and welcome move. This project will foster a plethora of large transit-oriented developments across the country, possibly resulting in the largest TOD undertaking in the world and thereby leading to higher transit ridership. This way, Indian Railways can efficiently monetize their land parcels, particularly in cities with higher densities, by commercially exploiting existing railway stations through sale of space rights over them. It will be great to see the arrival of more developments of the kind we see getting developed in Seawoods in Navi Mumbai and Karkardooma Metro station in Delhi.”

Konotor & PiQube Successfully Complete their Tenure at PayPal’s Start Tank at Chennai

PayPal, a global leader in online payments, today announced the graduation of the second batch of startups incubated at its Start Tank Incubation Center in Chennai, India. The two companies — Konotor and PiQube — started their incubation at Start Tank in November 2014. At their time of graduation, PiQube has raised $500,000 in funding from private investment company, HR Fund, while Konotor has recently announced its acquisition by software firm, Freshdesk. The occasion marks another milestone for Start Tank, which is located within PayPal’s Technology Center in Chennai.

PayPal’s Start Tank incubates early-age startups with the aim of enabling them to help revolutionize and drive innovation in the industry. The startups receive mentorship and infrastructure support from PayPal, as well as access to an extensive network of leaders from the industry, including The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) Chennai, a not-for-profit organization committed to the cause of entrepreneurship.

“This graduation is another major step in our commitment to the development of a strong technology ecosystem in India. As one of the world’s largest startups, it is rewarding to see the startups incubated at Start Tank benefit from our mentorship and expand their teams and businesses during their incubation period. PiQube and Konotor have done extremely well over the past year, and we wish the two companies the very best in their entrepreneurial endeavors.” said Guru Bhat, General Manager, Chennai Technology Center, PayPal.

Graduating Startups:

Konotor, founded by Srikrishnan Ganesan, Vignesh Girishankar and Deepak Balasubramanyam, is a product of Demach Software India Private Limited. It enables messaging between businesses and their app users for customers support, promotions, re-engagement, and more. Konotor provides the businesses the right tools to manage customer conversations, as well as the ability to engage in a contextual and personal way with their app users.

“This tenure at PayPal has helped us with our growth as a product and a business. We were able to benefit from availing access to great infrastructure to support our business, consult with PayPal architects for technology guidance, and bring more structure to our organization growth and business metrics. We are extremely delighted about the fact that Konotor has recently been acquired by Freshdesk Inc, a leading cloud-based customer support software company,” said Srikrishnan Ganesan, Co-founder, Konotor. 

PiQube, founded by Jayadev Mahalingam, is a hiring intelligence platform that uses Data Science and Human Judgment in the right proportion to help companies hire smarter, swifter, simpler. The machine learning platform aggregates companies and recruitment agencies. PiQube raised $500,000 from The HR Fund during its incubation at Start Tank.

“Since our incubation at Start Tank in 2014, PiQube has grown leaps and bounds. In terms of manpower, the company has expanded from a five member team to a 25 member team in a span of 15 months. On the business front, we have grown from zero customers to 75 customers with a 20-fold growth in revenue. PayPal has helped build our company in such a short span of time and we are extremely thankful to PayPal for the mentorship they have provided at their Start Tank facility,” said Jayadev, Chief Problem Creator at PiQube.

Rectify Tax Duty this Budget 2016 to Generate Four Lakh Jobs in IT Manufacturing Sector, Says MAIT Chief

IT hardware sector can generate four lakh jobs over five years if the government rectifies the tax duty structure in the Budget to encourage manufacturing of products such as notebook and desktop personal computers in India, says a study by industry body MAIT. 

"Measures of the Union Budget 2016-17 can potentially generate 4,00,000 jobs in the Indian IT manufacturing sector if estimated demand for 30 million PCs per annum is fulfilled entirely through domestic production over the next five years," MAIT Executive Director Anwar Shirpurwala said while sharing details of the study. 

The total estimated jobs include 1 lakh direct employment and 3 lakh jobs in component manufacturing over the next five years, the study noted. 

Policy reforms and plugging market ecosystem gaps can lead to doubling of IT hardware production in one year to US$ 2.6 billion and make India become a global electronic system design and manufacturing (ESDM) supply hub, it added. 

The study is based on data from some members of the Manufacturers' Association for Information Technology (MAIT), which includes chip-maker Intel, PC maker Lenovo and software giant Microsoft. 

The IT hardware industry through the Manufacturers' Association for Information Technology (MAIT) has suggested to the government that the differential excise duty regime introduced in 2015 for mobile phones and tablets be extended to notebook PCs and desktop PCs (personal computers) to encourage domestic manufacturing of IT products. 

The differential duty regime requires the excise duty on notebook PCs and desktop PCs to be brought down to 2 per cent without any facility for input tax input tax credits. 

MAIT has sought exemption from excise duty for parts, components and sub-assemblies that go into manufacturing of PCs. 

The excise duty structure for mobile handsets was changed to 1 per cent without Cenvat credit, or 12.5 per cent with Cenvat credit, which gave domestic manufacturers cost benefit of about 11 per cent over imported phones. 

The current fiscal saw investments in India from the world's biggest contract manufacturer Foxconn while many others such as Gionee, Xiaomi, Lava, Karbonn, HTC, Datawind, started production of their handsets locally. The mobile phone production in the country shot up by over 90 per cent to 100 million smartphones a year. 

"Due to various disabilities impacting domestic manufacturers, a large part of this (India) market is being served by imported products, mostly from China," Shirpurwala noted. 

According to MAIT, the revenue share of domestic manufacturers stood at only 45 per cent of the total ESDM market of US$ 31.6 billion in 2015 and the figure was even lower at around 32 per cent for the IT product market of US$ 5.8 billion. 

The study made a case for steps to be taken by the government to provide competitive advantage for exports of IT products from India. 

It suggested that the government should take steps to attract component manufacturers, which would provide a base for global players to establish their presence and invest in India. 

Agencies

US Based DigitalOcean to Invest $5 Million for Data Centre in Bangalore

DigitalOcean, a US-based developers’ cloud computing platform provider, has announced its plans to open its 12th data centre in India. 

With plans to launch the centre sometime in the second quarter of this year, the company plans an investment of $5 million for this year, which includes the setting up of the data centre. 

The company already has 58,000 registered users from India, including Flipkart, InMobi, KartRocket and Housing.com, among others. 

“Cloud in India is being led by the startup community, unlike in the West, which is led by enterprise users. Our offering is most cost-effective starting at $5 per month for 512 MB, and going up to $640 per month for 640 GB,” said Karl Alomar, COO, DigitalOcean. 

“DigitalOcean has built the simplest infrastructure experience for developers. Besides, the pricing model is also straight-forward,” said Mitch Wainer, Co-Founder, DigitalOcean. Stating that the company is bullish on the startup community here, he said, “With 4.5 million developers and over 4,000 startups taking ground in India in 2015, we are confident about the market as the leading cohort of users are going to be the adopters.” 

The company will initiate operations in India with 5-10 people at its data centre, and is in talks with Tata, Reliance and Airtel for network contracts.

 DigitalOcean to open 12th new data centre in India,   It plans to invest $5 million over the year, including setting up of the centre  The company will initiate India operations with 5-10 people at its data centre.

India's First Electric Scooter S340 Comes With Smartphone & Touchscreen Dashboard Features

Ather Energy, a Bangalore-based hardware startup has launched India’s first electric smart scooter called S340. The S340 comes with a range of up to 60 kilometres in one single charge. The company claims its Lithium Ion battery pack is IP67 rated and offers an uncompromised ride for 50,000 kms.

“The future will be connected and inevitably electric and the Ather S340 has been built as a manifestation of this philosophy. It is an unapologetically electric vehicle, it has been designed and built mostly in-house with engineering precision,” said Tarun Mehta, CEO & Co-Founder of Ather Energy.

He further added, “The automobile industry is in the midst of a huge technological disruption. The technology of electric vehicle has advanced in leaps and bounds. It is the preferred choice because of its inherent efficiency that will shape urban commute and the smart cities of tomorrow.”

The S340 is not just electric but also adds few smart connected elements to it. It comes with a touch-enabled dashboard which integrates cloud-based to personalise the consumer’s driving experience. It also embeds user profile based sign in like smartphones and has on-board navigation.

Ather Energy S340 also has driving modes like sport and economy very much like sports utility vehicles and premium sedans. The company has also developed its own S340 Mobile App which connects the rider with the vehicle and allows for remote syncing and configuring ride and profile preferences.

Ather Energy has a manufacturing unit set up in Whitefield, Bangalore and it believes the S340 will be a showcase for a Made in India product. Ather Energy also plans to sell the product online with doorstep delivery and service. The company has started pre-order for the smart scooter in Bangalore, Chennai and Pune. The company just doesn’t want to stop with the scooter, it wants to build an ambitious public charging infrastructure in every city that it operates in.

Haryana Holds Roadshow in Bangalore for Global Investors’ Summit-2016 in Gurgaon

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In order to attract investment in Haryana state has decided to organize a first of a kind “Happening Haryana Global Investors’ Summit-2016” from March 7-8, 2016 at Gurgaon. Haryana government held a roadshow at the Taj West End, Bangalore on February 23, 2016.

On Tuesday, the Haryana government led by Vivek Atray, Director Industries and Commerce, Government of Haryana; Sudhir Rajpal, Managing Director HSIIDC and industrialists Dinesh Batra, Director and Group CEO, Cygnus Hospitals and Sameer Munjal, MD, Satyam Auto Components also highlighted developments in farvour of Haryana to attract more investments from Karnataka at the Taj West End in Bangalore. 

As the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) is the national partner for the event, T Sudhakar Pai, Past Chairman, CII Karnataka and MD Kurlon Enterprises along with Ravi Raghavan, CEO, Bharat Fritz Werner were present from the CII side.

Haryana is looking at IT/ITeS companies from Karnataka, as Bangalore is well known as India’s IT city and off late attracting large MNC’s and billions of dollars in revenue. Sudhir Rajpal said likewise to Bangalore, even Haryana has IT Parks in Chandigarh, Faridabad and Rohtak and are now looking at expanding the parks and also enter into ESDM for cell phone manufacturers. The state government has set up plug and play facilities for startups and is also offering reduction in VAT, Stamp duty among others benefits. “No tax for startups till their turnover touches Rs 10 lakh.”

The two day event which is going to held on March 7 and 8 at Leela Hotel is expected to witness a large gathering of various international and national companies in the millennium city . Alongside the summit Pravasi Haryana Divas is also being organized to target investments of the entrepreneurs from the state, who have set shop abroad.  

As a preview the state is organizing five road shows across the country the first one was held in Delhi the second is in Kolkata which will be held on January 29 to create awareness among the people. The list of road shows includes Mumbai, Bangalore and Hyderabad.

Alongside the summit Pravasi Haryana Divas is also being organized to attract investments from entrepreneurs from the state, who have set shop abroad.  

The Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar accompanied by Industries Minister, Captain Abhimanyu met the CEOs and heads of various companies in one on one meetings held during the first road show in Delhi.

The Khattar government has offered Coca Cola India, for setting up ‘Kinnow’ juice plant at Food Park in Saha, Ambala. The organizers of the event have also informed that there was a discussion with chief minister of setting up a skill development project, in Gurgaon by Ascendas Singbridge Group.

Micromax, has also offered to set up a manufacturing unit in National Capital Region which is expected to provide employment to 5,500 youth with initial investment ranging from Rs 100 crore to Rs 500 crore. The state is also set to get an ‘Electronic Manufacturing Special Zone’ in Rohtak over an area of 100 acres of land.