Andhranews

Hyderabad, Aug. 21: Satyam Computer Services Ltd, the fourth largest software services exporter in the country, will be spending $100 million in capital expenditure in 2006-07 to expand its existing and new software development facilities in India, Mr Vadlamani Srinivas, the company’s chief financial officer, said on Monday.

Speaking to this newspaper on the sidelines of the Satyam’s 19th annual general meeting, Mr Srinivas said that as part of the capex, Satyam had acquired 230 acres of land in several cities, including Hyderabad, Nagpur, Chennai, Pune and Visakhapatnam. Satyam has acquired 20 acres of land in Hyderabad, where it currently has 10 offices where 12,000 of the company’s nearly 28,000 employees work, to set up a campus. Mr Srinivas said the capex will be funded from Satyam’s cash reserves of $700 million.

He said the company will be hiring about 8,000 employees in 2006-07, taking the total headcount to over 35,000. According to him, Satyam’s dependence on General Electric, its largest client for many years, had declined from 24 per cent of total revenues three years ago to about seven per cent now.
“This is part of our de-risking strategy, which also included initiatives to broadbase our client base in geographies other than the United States. The US market now contributes about 64 per cent of Satyam’s revenue compared to the over 84 per cent some years ago,” he said.

Mr Srinivas said Satyam’s strategy of focusing on big-ticket customers was beginning to pay dividends, with the New York Stock Exchange-list company increasing the number of customers who contributed over $10 million per annum in revenue from 9 to 22. Similarly, customers who accounted for more than $5 million in annual revenue had inc-reased to 51 from 20, while the million-dollars-per-year customers rose from 55 to 144.

Asked whether Satyam was expecting to acquire more companies to fuel its inorganic growth, Mr Srinivas said, “We are constantly looking for acquisitions, but there are a lot of opportunities for organic growth as well.” Satyam acquired Citisoft, a high-end software consulting firm in the UK, and KnowledgeDynamics in Singapore, for $25 million and $1.8 million, respectively, in 2005.

Satyam chairman B. Ramalinga Raju said the company was developing the the leadership bandwidth and innovating to emerge as a major software services and integration firm. Asked when Satyam expected to cross the $2 billion in revenues, having crossed the $1 billion mark in 2005-06, Mr Raju declined to comment. Mr Srinivas said Satyam had over 1.5 lakh investors. However, only about 300 investors attended the AGM, which approved the company’s proposal for a 1:1 bonus issue.

The company, which has a market capitalisation of over Rs 25,000 crore, has paid a dividend of 350 per cent in 2005-06. “Anybody who invested Rs one lakh in Satyam’s stock in 1994, has seen his stock value increase by 800 times. The Rs 1 lakh investment will now be worth Rs 8 crore,” Mr Srinivas said.

New Delhi, Aug. 21: The ministry of heavy industries has started the process of offloading its remaining 10.24 per cent stake in passenger car major Maruti Udyog Limited, said heavy industries minister Santosh Mohan Dev on Monday. Mr Mohan Dev said, “We have asked the finance ministry to sell 10.24 per cent stake that the government has in Maruti. It is now up to them to take the call.”

It may be pointed out here that last year, the government had sold 8 per cent shares in Maruti Udyog Ltd (MUL) for more than Rs 1,500 crores. The Cabinet will take the final decision to divest the remaining 10 per cent stake in Maruti. After the nod from the Cabinet, an inter-ministerial group would discuss the modalities of divestment. Mr Mohan Dev also announced that the ministry of heavy industries and public enterprises has prepared restructuring/revival packages for 24 Public Sector Enterprises (PSEs), out
of which the Cabinet has already approved the revival packages for 10 PSEs involving cash

infusion of Rs 365 crores and government financial support of Rs 2,850 crores.
Speaking about other PSUs under the ministry of heavy industries, Mr Dev said that government would invest additional capital in the tractor unit of HMT. He also said that Bharat Heavy Plates and Vessels and Bharat Pumps and Compressors would be handed over to other PSUs as part of the restructuring package.

Mr Dev informed the newspersons that the Prime Minister has also agreed “in principle” to release Rs 138 crores for liquidating the salaries and other statutory dues of PSUs under the ministry of heavy industries. The minister also said that the auto sector had an excellent growth over the last two years at the rate of nearly 20 per cent and that the export component has grown at an all-time high rate of 35 to 40 per cent.

New Delhi, Aug. 21: Bharti Airtel and Microsoft have come together to launch the Windows mobile 5.0 platform. This mobile boasts of having features no less than a personal computer. The Microsoft’s Windows mobile 5.0 platform offers a number of applications on the mobile like the facility to send and receive emails on the move.

Targeting an estimated four million Small and Medium Enterprises potential users, the new business solution portfolio with Microsoft Windows mobile 5.0 will help Airtel users access MS Office multimedia functionalities like camera, MP3 and video recording and line-up business applications like self-force automation on their mobile phone.

“Our research has shown that 98 per cent of the businessmen on the move check their emails on the mobile and with the push mail messaging service offered by the Airtel, it will surely be a new experience for our customers,” said Mr Manoj Kohli, president of Bharti Airtel. This platform is viable for broader adoption by enterprise customers as a large number of such organisations in India use MS Exchange as their core platform for mail applications.

Nagpur, Aug. 21: Mr Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Group may soon enter the sugar sector in the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra. The indication came from chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh here on Sunday evening. The Reliance Group was willing to invest in Vidarbha’s sugar sector, Mr Deshmukh said while speaking at a “Meet the Press” programme hosted by Nagpur Union of Working Journalists (NUWJ).

He said that initial discussions had been held, but a final decision was pending, adding that a meeting would be held shortly to work out the details. Mr Deshmukh said the entry of a private sector player would help revive the sick sugar factories and improve the financial condition of the farmers in Vidarbha. The private sector player would enter into contracts with farmers to buy their produce of sugarcane and also operate the sugar factories, he said.

Farmers had stopped cultivating sugarcane in Vidarbha because they did not get remunerative prices for their produce, Mr Deshmukh said. Therefore, sugar mills in Vidarbha did not get sufficient sugarcane to crush, forcing them to shut down, he said. Private participation would encourage farmers to grow more sugarcane, thus helping run the mills, he said.

The proposed revival of the sugar sector in Vidarbha is evidently to encourage farmers in the region to take up crops other than cotton to boost their income. Mr Deshmukh himself said farmers in Vidarbha should go for multi-cropping rather than rely solely on cotton, with sugarcane being a very viable option. Like in western Maharashtra, the sugar manufacturing business has hitherto been the domain of the cooperative sector in Vidarbha too.

Mumbai, Aug. 21: The Hyderabad-based GMR Infrastructure Limited listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange at Rs 215 and closed marginally up at Rs 210.25 on Monday. The issue price of the IPO was fixed at Rs 210. The company listed at Rs 216 on the National Stock Exchange.

Mr Grandhi Mallikarjuna Rao, chairman, GMR Group, who rang the opening bell enthusiastically amid a very festive atmosphere at the BSE’s convention hall, said, “For the first time since the incorporation of the BSE and the NSE, there is a pure infrastructure development holding company being listed on the bourses. This is also the first time that investors are being offered an opportunity to participate in one of the largest privatisation and modernisation programmes and greenfield projects for airports.”

He said that when they decided to enter the market with the IPO, many of their well-wishers tried to dissuade them saying that the market sentiment was low. “We still decided to proceed because we were confident of our company and business,” Mr Rao said.He said that their business model is unique and can only be compared to global conglomerates like Macquarie Australia, Ferrovial Spain, China Merchant Holdings International Hong Kong and Vinci Europe.

It’s the only company with a mix of revenue streams — fixed returns, pure market driven returns and also a combination of fixed/market driven returns. These concessions range from 20 to 60 years with stable cash flows. Mr Rao said that 40 per cent of their revenue will come from the airport, and 15 per cent from road projects.

He said that they plan to build hotels and convention and residential centres on the land they have at Hyderabad. GMR Infrastructure Limited proposes to use the proceeds from the fresh issue for investment in infrastructure special purpose vehicles.

Advertisers do not always need funny commercials, snappy slogans or catchy jingles to capture the attention of consumers. Often, all it takes are combinations of letters and numbers like FPAYM J9CN7,K3GM A7F7 HTQ6 or 6Z9NB G94RB Y9V47. Major marketers like Cadbury Schweppes, Coca-Cola, DaimlerChrysler, Hershey and PepsiCo are sponsoring elaborate promotional campaigns centred on such codes.

The codes, redeemable for prizes or for entry into sweepstakes, can be found on product wrappers, box tops and labels; under bottle caps; and on cards given away at stores or dealerships. Code-centric promotions have long been a mainstay of Madison Avenue, helping advertisers stimulate sales and persuading occasional buyers to become loyal customers. They go back to the 1930’s, when brands like Ovaltine offered radio listeners “secret decoders” and other prizes in exchange for saving proofs of purchase.

Now, code promotions, like so many other traditional marketing tactics, are being transformed by high technology. No longer are consumers seeking to redeem codes required to go to the post office, call toll-free telephone numbers or visit stores. Rather, they can go online to dedicated websites where codes are processed far faster than before and where marketers can expose them to additional promotions, ads and offers, as well as collect email addresses and demographic information. In some instances, consumers can enter codes by sending cellphone text messages.

“The idea of logging in every day to see if you’ve won takes codes beyond simple proof-of-purchase promotions,” said Joseph Jaffe, president of Jaffe L.L.C., a marketing consultancy, and the author of Life After the 30-Second Spot (John Wiley & Sons, 2005).
“The codes of yesterday were a foot in the door for marketers,” Mr Jaffe said. “Now they’re substantive branding tools, encouraging full-blown relationships.”

One example of the changes wrought by the Internet is a promotion called My Coke Rewards, introduced by Coca-Cola in February. The multiyear promotion is housed on a website (my-cokerewards.com) where consumers open accounts, accumulate points by entering codes and can redeem the points for prizes from Coca-Cola or other companies including Adidas, Delta Air Lines and Hilton.

“We could never do a programme of the size and scale of My Coke Rewards without it being online,” said Katie Bayne, senior vice-president for Coca-Cola brands in North America, who is based in Atlanta. The promotion has already “overdelivered on our expectations,” she added, with more than 2.5 million accounts opened and more than 543,000 prizes claimed.

Hyderabad, Aug. 21: The good-old fixed deposits (FDs) appear to be back in fashion with banks offering higher yields on short-term products to attract long-term funds. This gives the risk-averse investor a safer option to park his funds at a time of uncertainty in the equity markets, sky-high real estate and bullion prices.

The first to launch a new push for FDs was ICICI Bank which recently announced an 8 per cent rate for deposits of 390 days. Kotak Mahindra Bank followed ICICI Bank with an offer of 8 per cent for 280 days and IndusInd Bank joined in with 8 per cent for a maturity of 270 days. ABN Amro offers an interest rate of 8 per cent on a 400-day FD.

Elsewhere, the largest commercial bank in the country, State Bank of India, raised interest rates on deposits by 25-50 basis points across various maturities to match the rates offered by its competitors. SBI hiked deposit rates by 50 basis points on deposits of one year to less than three years to 6.75 per cent and three years to less than five years to 7 per cent.

Commenting on the spurt in attractive FD products, Development Credit Bank managing director and CEO, Mr Gautam Vir, observed, “With rising interest rates and investors partly staying away from the stock markets and real estate right now, banks have latched onto the high-yielding FD trend which will be a short-term phenomenon.” FDs are back in the limelight after a gap of four years when the deposit rates remained unattractive.

Till December 2004, SBI offered an interest rate of five per cent on a 1-year FD which went upto 6.25 per cent in June 2006. Incidentally, the government too chipped in when it announced tax benefits for five-year fixed deposits up to an investment of Rs one lakh. This prompted banks to offer attractive rates on long-term deposits. Further, the Reserve Bank of India had urged banks to mop up more retail deposits, which are high on the durability factor.

This would, in effect, help banks correct mismatches between assets and liabilities.
Banking analysts believe banks are increasing deposit rates, as non-food credit has been growing at a much faster clip than the rise in the deposit rates. Therefore, banks need money to offer for credit.

But equity experts are, however, unperturbed by this trend. “Currently, the debt markets are strong and are bound to give good returns. But we see marginal impact on investors moving out from stocks and mutual funds to FDs. After all, the markets are in the mid of another rally,” explains the Hyderabad head of a Mumbai-based brokerage firm, who believes that the trend would continue for 14-15 months.However, this FD run might impact the small savings and post office savings instruments whose interest rates are still lower than the products on offer.

SBI won’t raise home loan rates

New Delhi, Aug 21: State Bank of India on Monday said it is not planning to hike home loan rates in the near future, but admitted that there is pressure on these interest rates.
“There is pressure on interest rates for home loans, but we are not raising them in the near future,” SBI chairman O.P. Bhatt said after meeting finance minister P. Chidambaram here.

If the University of Rochester in the US has its way, then the world of computing could have a new “ballistic computing” chip design that could lead to 3,000-gigahertz — that’s 3-terahertz — processors that produce very little heat.“Everyone has been trying to make better transistors by modifying current designs, but what we really need is the next paradigm,” says Quentin Diduck, a graduate student at the University who thought up the radical new design. “We’ve gone from the relay, to the tube, to semiconductor physics. Now we’re taking the next step on the evolutionary track.”

The university says that the next step goes by the imposing name of “Ballistic Deflection Transistor,” and it’s as far from traditional transistors as tubes. Instead of running electrons through a transistor as if they were a current of water, the ballistic design bounces individual electrons off deflectors as if playing a game of atomic billiards. Though today’s transistor design has many years of viability left, the amount of heat these transistors generate and the electrical “leaks” in their ultra-thin barriers have already begun to limit their speed.

Research groups around the world are investigating strange new designs to generate ways of computing at speeds unthinkable with today’s chips. The Ballistic Deflection Transistor adds a new twist by bouncing the electrons into their chosen trajectories-using inertia to redirect for “free”, instead of wrestling the electrons into place with brute energy. Such a chip would use very little power, create very little heat, be highly resistant to “noise” inherent in electronic systems, and should be easy to manufacture with current technologies. All that would make it incredibly fast.

The National Science Foundation is so impressed with the idea that it just granted the University of Rochester team $1.1 million to develop a prototype. The team has already had some luck in fabricating a prototype. The ballistic transistor is a nano-scale structure, and so all but impossible to engineer just a few years ago. Its very design means that this “large” prototype is already nearly as small as the best conventional transistor designs coming out of Silicon Valley today.

There’s one hurdle the team isn’t quite as confident about: “We’re talking about a chip speed measured in terahertz, a thousand times faster than today’s desktop transistors,” Diduck says. “We have to figure out how to test it because there’s no such thing as a terahertz oscilloscope!” The BDT is “ballistic” because it is made from a sheet of semiconductor material called a “2D electron gas”, which allows the electrons to travel without hitting impurities, which would impede the transistor’s performance.

Hyderabad, Aug. 21: The Development Credit Bank will be raising Rs 200 crores to fund its expansion, even as the bank is planning a foray into the microfinance segment, Mr Gautam Vir, the bank’s managing director and CEO, said here on Monday.
Mr Vir said DCB expects to launch the IPO in the next one month.

“We have sought permission from the Reserve Bank of India for expanding our branch network from the current 72 branches,” Mr Vir said. The 70-year-old bank, promoted by the Switzerland-based Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development, completed a private equity placement of Rs 52 crores to HDFC Ltd, Khattar Holdings, and Amtel Finance, in February.

The investors picked up a 15 per cent stake in DCB through the preferential share issue. According to Mr Nasser Munjee, chairman of DCB, the bank had completed the restructuring of its financials and its management, and had posted a net profit of Rs 4.3 crores in the first quarter of 2006-07, against a net loss of Rs 24.2 crores year-on-year. The bank had posted a net loss of Rs 85.3 crores in 2005-06, compared to Rs 162.9 crores in the previous year.

“We have made provisions for the losses, and our Capital Adequacy Ratio is above the stipulated nine per cent,” Mr Munjee, a former managing director and CEO of Infrastructure Development Finance Company Ltd, said. He said the bank’s NPAs had been reduced from 6.5 per cent to 3.99 per cent. Mr Vir said that post the IPO, the promoter’s shareholding in the bank would be diluted to 31 per cent from 58 per cent.

“DCB is broadbasing its loan portfolio, with more focus on SMEs and the retail segment,” he said. Referring to microfinance initiative, he said the bank was exploring tie-ups with various NGOs.

New Delhi, Aug. 21: Domestic liquor company Radico Khaitan Limited (RKL) and international liquor major Diageo on Monday announced an agreement to form a 50:50 joint venture, to exploit what it calls the large and developing segment of “Indian-made foreign liquor” (IMFL).

A spokesperson for Radico Khaitan said that the joint venture will be subject to obtaining the requisite regulatory approvals. The details of the JV will be finalised post the approvals, the spokesperson said, refusing to divulge any financial details at this stage. Mr Asif Adil, managing director of Diageo India, said that Diageo was excited at partnering with Radico to “bring new innovative products” for the Indian consumers in the IMFL market.

The Radico Khaitan spok-esperson said that the new joint venture (JV) company will create new brands in the IMFL categories, to market and distribute these new brands. It said that both the companies will continue to market their respective brands in the country, irrespective of the proposed JV. The spokesperson said that the new brands will be created, keeping price points in which the two liquor majors are not present now. The company did not comment on the new brands that they plan to bring out.

Mumbai, Aug. 21: It was the Monday morning blues for the Sensex in line with the Asian markets, but the tempo picked up a little in the afternoon on bargain hunting. It closed 45.96 points up at 11,511.68 while the Nifty closed 9.25 points up at 3,366 after seeing an intra-day high of 3,374.90. The Asian markets, however, did not recover and were down on news of China raising interest rates.

The Nikkei was down 136.94 points, the Hang Seng 322.87, the Taiwan index 215.16 and the Kospi and Straits Times down 16.23 and 9.43 respectively. The turnover on the Bombay Stock Exchange and the National Stock Exchange totalled Rs 26,343 crores, of which Rs 18,042 was accounted for by the F&O sector.

The market breadth recorded 534 stocks ending in the green and 367 in the red. Both the Nifty and the Sensex were pulled down by heavyweight ONGC which lost Rs 20.20 and Dr Reddy Rs 22.40. Among the other index stocks that were down were Ranbaxy Rs 8.05, HLL Rs 1.95, Hero Honda Rs 9.35 and Tata Steel Rs 4.30.