The hidden face of Primark fashion

The huge fashion store Primark sacked three of its suppliers last week after an investigation for the BBC’s Panorama and The Observer uncovered children labouring in Indian refugee camps to produce some of its cheapest garments. In this report from Tamil Nadu, India, The Observor’s Dan McDougall reveals the brutal reality of a supply chain that sees children as young as 11 sewing T-shirts which cost shoppers just a few pounds to buy on high streets across Britain.

Its unrivalled success took the competition by surprise as it won over both the high-street shopper and the diehard fashionista with its simple philosophy: high on style, low on price.

When Primark was launched, its flagship store in London’s Oxford Street was besieged by stampeding bargain-hunters and sold more than a million garments in its first 10 days. The opening drew a bigger crowd than that managed by Topshop’s much-hyped launch of its Kate Moss collection, which featured the supermodel herself moodily posing in its windows. Fashion bible Vogue gave a Primark jacket high-end credibility.

Last week, in an announcement that effectively pre-empted publication by The Observer of this investigation, Primark announced it had sacked three of its clothing suppliers in India after being told by the BBC’s Panorama programme of evidence that it was subcontracting labour to child workers. The investigation found that in the refugee camps of southern India young children had been working long hours in foul conditions to sew the designs that will see, at current growth rates, Primark eclipse Marks & Spencer as Britain’s biggest mass-market fashion retailer by 2009, taking £1 of every £10 spent on clothing in the UK.

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An Indian tycoon’s tale

India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, is shaping his country via capitalism, with echoes of Mohandas Gandhi. Anand Giridharadas in The New York Times:

At a recent cricket match here, Mukesh D. Ambani sat in his private box quietly watching the team he owns, the Mumbai Indians. He seemed oblivious to the others around him: his son cheering wildly, his wife draped in diamond jewelry and a smattering of guests anxiously awaiting the briefest opportunity to speak with him.

A minor bureaucrat stood a few rows back, strategizing with aides about how to buttonhole “the Chairman,” as Mr. Ambani is sometimes called. Waiters in baggy tuxedoes took turns trying to offer him a snack, but as they drew near became too nervous to speak.

In the last century, Mohandas K. Gandhi was India’s most famous and powerful private citizen. Today, Mr. Ambani is widely regarded as playing that role, though in a very different way. Like Mr. Gandhi, Mr. Ambani belongs to a merchant caste known as the modh banias, is a vegetarian and a teetotaler and is a revolutionary thinker with bold ideas for what India ought to become.

[Photo: Mukesh Ambani with his daughter, Isha, at a cricket match of the Mumbai Indians, which he owns. NYTimes]

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Inside India’s shocker pharma deal

Japan’s Daiichi Sankyo makes Ranbaxy Laboratories an offer it can’t refuse-$4.6 billion for a 50.1% stake in India’s largest drugmaker. Nandini Lakshman in BusinessWeek:

It was, perhaps, India’s best-kept corporate secret. On June 11, Ranbaxy Laboratories, the largest Indian drugmaker, said it was giving up control to Daiichi Sankyo, the No. 3 Japanese pharmaceutical company. Daiichi will buy a 50.1% stake in Ranbaxy for nearly $4.6 billion, or $17.14 per share, a 31% premium over Ranbaxy’s current share price. The deal doubles Ranbaxy’s market capitalization to $8.5 billion, putting Daiichi Sankyo at No. 15 in the global pharma pecking order.

Why would Ranbaxy Managing Director Malvinder Singh bail out of a company set up by his grandfather Bhai Mohan Singh and built by his visionary father, the late Parvinder Singh? At Ranbaxy’s televised press conference in New Delhi after the announcement of the sale, Singh confessed that “he had never ever anticipated not holding equity in Ranbaxy.”

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Ranbaxy makes Indian corporate history

John Elliott on his Fortune blog:

The recent trend has been for Indian companies to take over foreign businesses - ranging from Jaguar cars to Corus steel - but this is the first time that a major successful Indian company has agreed to sell control to a foreign company.

It is also the first time that a successful business family - in this case the Singhs - has planned to sell control of its primary operations to anyone, either Indian or foreign.

It parallels Anil Ambani’s current negotiations to sell his Reliance Communications telecom company to MTN of South Africa in a deal that would make him the eventual owner of the combined group, which is expected to be based in Johannesburg.

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A new way to make music in India

Mumbai nightclub the Blue Frog, under the direction of the energetic Ashutosh Pathak, has been transformed into India’s first full-service recording studio. From BusinessWeek:

Tucked away inside an old textile mill compound in Mumbai’s Lower Parel area, with no sign to announce its presence, is the Blue Frog, the city’s popular live music nightclub and jazz joint. Life begins at 10.30 p.m. here, with the place packed with music-lovers from around the city and around India, and visiting foreigners in the know. The Blue Frog has been around for a year, and on May 19 made a giant leap from nightclub to professional music production house-India’s first. The studios are located right behind the club, in a 10,000-sq.-ft. former mill, complete with skylights, high-tech equipment, and vibrant contemporary Asian art.

Based on the initial reaction from India’s advertising and entertainment industry, Blue Frog’s bold move seems to be a winning one. On opening night every important player from the music, film, and advertising worlds showed up to witness this new venture: singers Lucky Ali, Ila Arun, and Rags Khote were there, along with advertising filmmakers Prasoon Pandey of Corcoise and Ayesha Sayani of Shunyata Productions, and Sony-BMG chief Shridhar Subramaniam, WPP group’s India country-head Ranjan Kapoor, veteran singer Gary Lawyer, hot young VJs, and musician-turned-politician Milind Deora.

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Man in the news: Anil Ambani

Joe Leahy in Financial Times:

Anil Ambani, the Indian industrialist, was on a family holiday in a game park in South Africa earlier last month when the news came. Takeover talks had collapsed between rival billionaire entrepreneur Sunil Mittal, chairman of India’s biggest mobile carrier Bharti Airtel, and MTN, the South African wireless operator. Mr Ambani promptly switched from passively viewing the big game to hunting - going after one of the biggest emerging markets telecoms groups.

Last week, his mobile phone company, Reliance Communications, engaged MTN in exclusive talks for an audacious reverse takeover that would put him at the helm of a group with 115m subscribers across Africa, the Middle East and India. In some estimates the deal could be worth $20bn (£10bn, €13bn) - the largest overseas takeover tried by an Indian company.

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Tata’s new ratan

Ford completes the £1.7 billion deal to sell British icons Jaguar and Land Rover to Tata. BBC News has that story.

Ford has completed the sale of its Jaguar and Land Rover businesses to Indian conglomerate Tata in a deal valued at £1.7bn.

The companies are being sold for £1.15bn with Ford paying £600m into the pension fund of the luxury brands.

The negotiations started last June and the deal was announced in March.

Ford is selling the firms to try and boost overall performance. Land Rover remains profitable but Ford has never made money from its Jaguar investment.

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And for a story on India Inc’s global acquisition spree, read this story in The Economic Times here.

Arun Sarin hangs up

In the UK Telegraph, Damian Reece looks at Arun Sarin’s departure from Vodafone

When any chief executive says “the timing is right” for his departure, you know something must be wrong. Either he’s being dragged kicking and screaming out of the door and forced to admit it’s time to go, through gritted teeth, or he’s seen the top of a trend and decided to quit before his luck runs out.

In the case of Arun Sarin, chief executive of Vodafone, either scenario could have been true at different times during his five-year tenure. In the early part of 2006 he was being stalked by the boardroom equivalent of an angry mob who wanted him out. He saw off the Vodafone old guard who were leading that particular torch-lit lynch mob. Then he had to deal with the disaster that Vodafone had made of Japan, selling that business but again against the background of much criticism.

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India’s graduates given British polish

The subcontinent’s IT companies are giving graduates soft-skills training to help them deal with working in the West. From The Times, UK:

As if completing a gruelling engineering degree was not enough, a new generation of globetrotting Indian IT workers faces extra schooling on how to deal with British quirks of business.

Most of India’s large technology companies run “finishing schools”, where graduates who are going to work in the West are taught how to dress (no white socks with black shoes), eat (no belching at the table; use a knife and fork, not your hands) and speak (to remedy the habit of young Indians saying yes when they mean no).

Britain can be a bemusing place for somebody brought up in rural India - more so if they have to deal with the foibles of a FTSE 100 chief executive, according to Girish Vaidya, of Infosys, India’s second-largest software exporter.

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Sorry, Asia, you smell

Unilever prepares to tell 3 billion Asians they need to use deodorant. From The Times, UK:

You might think twice before telling a friend, and you would bite your lip rather than mention it to your boss, but one soap company has no qualms about telling 3 billion Asians that they need to use a deodorant.

Unilever is preparing to confront the issue head-on with a marketing and advertising push directed at a new Asian generation.

Russell Taylor, global vice-president for Axe, the Unilever-made deodorant marketed as Lynx in Britain, said that no one had yet found a way of making Asians self-conscious about body odour. “Asia is a market we have never really cracked. They don’t think they smell, but people everywhere smell,” he said.

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The other Rs one lakh car

Renault, Nissan and Bajaj come together to produce a small car that will cost Rs one lakh — the same as Tata’s Nano. On sale from 2011, the car will be produced at Chakan in Maharashtra near the existing manufacturing facilities of both Bajaj and Renault. Ravi Krishnan and Ammar Master have the story in Mint

Renault SA, Nissan Motor Co. and Bajaj Auto Ltd said in a joint statement that they would collaborate to produce a small car that would cost around $2,500 (Rs1 lakh), making it the second car in the world and in India with ambitions to be the cheapest four-wheeler on the road.

The three firms will set up a joint venture company in which India’s No. 2 motorbike maker, Bajaj, will hold the single largest majority with half the ownership, while partners Nissan and Renault will hold a quarter each. On sale from 2011, the cars—some 400,000 of them each year—will be produced in Maharashtra, at Chakan, near the existing manufacturing facilities of both Bajaj and Renault.

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Indian telecom giant returns to his roots

Journalist and old India hand John Elliott on Sunil Bharti Mittal’s new personal challenge in his blog Riding The Elephant hosted by Forbes

Sunil Bharti Mittal, founding chairman of Bharti Airtel, India’s largest mobile phone operator, needs a new personal challenge. And he has found it with the $19 billion informal bid that he is reported to have made, or at least is considering, for MTN, the South African-based telecoms group.

Last week Mittal finished a year as president of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), a leading business federation. That was a time-consuming post that tied him up in tedious committee work, which he disliked. His group is also partnering with Wal-Mart (WMT) in a slow-developing retail and cash-and-carry business, but that is primarily being looked after by one of his brothers.

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Tea, cars, steel, IT… Tata, the headiest brew in the world

India’s extraordinary conglomerate has found unique solutions to many of its problems. But it’s still unclear what will happen when the boss retires. Heather Connon reports from Mumbai in The Observor, UK:

The favourite boast of executives of the Tata Group is that it accompanies the average Indian throughout the day. They wake to the alarm of its Titan clocks, drink its tea or coffee for breakfast, wear clothes bought from its Westside shopping centres, take a Tata car or bus to work on a computer set up by Tata Consultancy Services, lunch in a Tata hotel, arrange their evening appointments on a Tata mobile phone and use Tata power to light their homes.

These days, the influence of the Indian conglomerate is spreading beyond its home country. Back in 2000, it made the first major acquisition by an Indian group when it acquired the Tetley tea company; last year, that was trumped when it bought steelmaker Corus for £6.2bn, while in March it was confirmed as the purchaser of British icons Jaguar and Land-Rover from Ford. Next month, it will make its first foray into UK financial services when New Star launches an Indian investment fund that will be managed by Tata Asset Management.

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The world’s costliest home? Mukesh Ambani’s Mumbai skyscraper

Mukesh Ambani’s 27-storey, $2 billion, vaastu-compliant skyscraper, Antilla in downtown Mumbai, when completed, will be the world’s costliest residence. Matt Woolsey has the story in Forbes.

While visiting New York in 2005, Nita Ambani was in the spa at the Mandarin Oriental New York, overlooking Central Park. The contemporary Asian interiors struck her just so, and prompted her to inquire about the designer.

Nita Ambani was no ordinary tourist. She is married to Mukesh Ambani, head of Mumbai-based petrochemical giant Reliance Industries, and the fifth richest man in the world. ( Lakshmi Mittal, ranked fourth, is an Indian citizen, but a resident of the U.K.)

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Take a tour of the world’s costliest home in pictures here.

Aditya Mittal: billionaire’s boy with ambition

Aditya Mittal has spent a decade helping his father build the world’s biggest steel company. Will he take the top slot? Or could worries over nepotism make him prove himself elsewhere? In the Sunday Times, UK, the Andrew Davidson interview:

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.

“I was in Jakarta last week,” says Aditya Mittal. “I had a meeting with the president at 5pm, and I had to decide whether to go to Hanoi, Kuala Lumpur or Singapore afterwards, and I was driving the flight crew [of Mittal's private jet] mad.

“So after my meeting, I say to the crew, hey, we’ll do dinner in Kuala Lumpur, then take off for Hanoi. I have a nice dinner, then at 1am the crew tell me we have a problem, the immigration guys have gone to sleep in Vietnam, but it’s okay, we can land and they will give me a police escort to my hotel room, stand outside all night, then send in immigration in the morning to stamp my passport.”

Aditya Mittal smiles. He is a billionaire’s boy with serious ambition.

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Call my lawyer … in India

Call-centre jobs were first; now U.S. companies are looking offshore for their legal work too. From TIME:

Mark Alexander, a Dallas attorney, says he’s ethically obligated to do what’s best for his clients, “and that includes saving them money.” So when one of them asks him to research a securities-fraud topic, for example, or breach of contract, he doesn’t even think about applying his $395 hourly rate. Instead, he calls Atlas Legal Research, an outsourcing company based in Irving, Texas, that uses lawyers in India to provide the service for $60 per hr. “When a client pays me a $25,000 retainer and I can save them money, I will do so,” says Alexander. Handing off the work to a $225-per-hr. junior associate is not an option. “They don’t even know where to stand in the courtroom,” he says.

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Tata lands Rover and Jaguar

Ford on Wednesday confirmed that it has agreed to sell its luxury UK-based car brands Land Rover and Jaguar marques to Indian group Tata for $2.3bn (£1.15bn). In The Guardian, UK, Randeep Ramesh reports from Mumbai on how Tata has persevered – and largely succeeded:

When Italy’s L’Expresso magazine last month splashed with the news that Ratan Tata (photo), chairman of India’s Tata group, was going to buy up luxury car marque Ferrari the story made front page news across the world.

Although later denied, what was surprising was no one thought a bid from Mumbai’s Tata for Milan’s most wanted brand implausible. After all Tata had spent £6.7bn buying Anglo-Dutch rival Corus. It was certain to snap up Jaguar and Land Rover.

Few remember that Tata’s first car 10 years ago, the Indica, was little more than a noisy box on wheels. It was instantly dubbed “Ratan’s folly”.

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Tata buys into 40 years of trouble

In Fortune, John Elliott has a word, or two, of warning for Ratan Tata

Ratan Tata, who runs the Tata Group, one of India’s two biggest conglomerates, is buying into a history of trouble with his $2.3 billion cash deal, announced today,  to acquire the Jaguar and Land-Rover companies from Ford (F). Transfer of ownership to Tata Motors is due to be completed by the end of June, and the  question is whether Tata can then break a cycle of decline.

It’s been 40 years since the British government, in a bid to rebuild the country’s automobile industry, cobbled together ailing car brands such as Jaguar, Rover, Austin, Morris and Riley into a giant called British Leyland. BL, as it became known, was a failure, mainly because of endemic labor problems, uninspired products and poor quality. Since 1968, there have been many rescue attempts, but only rare short bursts of success. Several of the once proud names are long forgotten and none is British-owned; the iconic MG brand was bought three years ago by China’s Nanjing Automobile to make sports cars in China and the U.K., and the Morris Mini cult car is with BMW.

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Previously on Asian Window:

• Tata’s Nano: An ingenious coup
• India driving
• India’s most powerful people

Sony goes to Bollywood — and learns a lesson

From Financial Times:

It was a visit to India a few years ago that convinced Michael Lynton, head of Sony Pictures Entertainment, that it was time to tackle Bollywood, one of the last great frontiers for Hollywood in the world movie business.

Sony had been embedded in India’s television industry for more than a decade but no Hollywood studio had tried its hand at that great Indian film tradition - the three-hour song-and-dance extravaganza aimed at the sub-continent’s movie-crazy audiences. Mr Lynton was impressed by the growth of the film industry in India.

The result was Hollywood’s first attempt at a Bollywood film - the Hindi-language Saawariya, a moody romance about unrequited love.

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Outsourcing: the other side

Tata jobs bloom in middle America, reports Chidanand Rajghatta in The Times of India

More than a century after the company’s great forbear Jamshedji Tata scoured Ohio looking for steel expertise, India’s tech major Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) opened a 1000-seat delivery centre outside Cincinnati on Monday, marking a small but significant counter to overwrought reports about job flight from the United States.

Eminences ranging from the state governor to the local school superintendent turned up for the inauguration of the new facility, to hear and exult about 1000 jobs being created in the area. It was a rare moment of relief, pride, and vindication too for India - and an Indian company - which has been under attack from protectionist forces in the US for taking away American jobs.
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Indians continue to rock the Forbes billionaire list

The Forbes list of billionaires is just out and the Indian billionaire club is thriving. Although China has the most number of new billionaires on The List (28), the wealth amassed by Indian billionaires is more than 3.5 times that of those in China.

India, incidentally, has 19 newbies on The List — with at least one (Sameer Gehlaut of India Bulls) below the age of 40.

And, finally, India has retained its position as Asia’s biggest source of billionaires — 53 of them with a combined wealth of $340.9 billion. India’s Fab Four — Lakshmi Mittal, Mukesh Ambani, Anil Ambani and K.P. Singh — retain their place in The List’s T20 (top 20).

Check out the complete list, edited by Luisa Kroll at Forbes:

After 13 years on top, Bill Gates is no longer the richest man in the world. That honor now belongs to his friend and sometimes bridge partner Warren Buffett.
Riding the surging price of Berkshire Hathaway stock, Buffett has seen his fortune swell to an estimated $62 billion, up $10 billion from a year ago.

Gates is now worth $58 billion and is ranked third richest in the world. He is up $2 billion from a year ago, but would have been as rich–or richer–than Buffett, had Microsoft not made an unsolicited bid for Yahoo! at the beginning of February. Mexican telecom mogul Carlos Slim Helú now ranks as the world’s second richest person with a net worth of $60 billion.

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Mr Yunus goes to New York

Emily Parker in The Wall Street Journal on Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank’s new venture in the land of the subprime mortgage crisis. Via Mint:

In a Jackson Heights shop for colourful saris and glittering bracelets, several women have gathered to meet their banker. They laugh and chat in Bengali. Sultana, a 39-year-old woman wearing a headscarf, hands him $128 in cash. She is making her first repayment of the $3,000, six-month loan she’ll use to help with her husband’s candy store.

Welcome to Grameen America, Muhammad Yunus’ brand new microfinance venture. Yunus, along with his Bangladesh-originated Grameen Bank, won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for battling poverty by lending out small sums of money to the poor. The loans are mainly for income-generating activities-from making baskets to raising chickens. Since its establishment in 1983, Grameen has given out billions of dollars in loans, helping to pull families out of poverty and inspiring similar operations all over the world.

Yunus has now brought Grameen to this borough of New York City.

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Kerala’s elephant economics

In Mint, Ajayan on how elephants are auctioned during the festival season in Kerala:

The four-month-long festival season has started in Kerala’s temples — the season starts in January, peaks in February and March, and tapers off in April — and local organizing committees are shopping for elephants. And given that pride, and a lot of money from West Asia — where a lot of people from the state work (and from where they repatriate funds to families back home) — is at stake, not just any elephant will do.

The pachyderm of choice has to be tall, have large ears, a trunk that almost reaches the ground, long and unbroken tusks, and an impressive fan of hair at the end of its short tail.

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India’s king of good times

On Bloomberg, Abhay Singh and Subramaniam Sharma profile India billionaire Vijay Mallya.

Vijay Mallya touches down at New Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport in his Airbus Corporate Jet on the afternoon of Jan. 19. Stepping off the plane after flying in from his home in Sausalito, California, the 52-year-old Indian billionaire dives into a Mercedes-Benz to drive to a meeting with a government minister. The next stop is the Metropolitan hotel to interview flight attendants for his Kingfisher Airlines Ltd.

Back in his house on New Delhi’s Sardar Patel road by 8 p.m., he nurses a tumbler of whisky distilled by Glasgow, Scotland-based Whyte & Mackay Ltd., his latest acquisition, as Accenture Ltd. consultants advise him on Kingfisher’s merger with India’s Deccan Aviation Ltd.

After replacing jeans and jacket with a dark suit, white shirt and pink tie, Mallya heads to a dinner hosted by his liquor company, United Spirits Ltd. He’s home by midnight, then off to Mumbai at 2 a.m. to bid $112 million for — and eventually win — a new cricket team in Bangalore.

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Faith-based investing

Seeking stocks with a soul is the new mantra in India. Priyanka P. Narain and Rachna Monga in Mint:

Besides the usual inspection of a stock’s value and growth potential, independent broker N.V. Shah runs through an additional list of questions. Namely: Is the investment supporting violence?

“No matter what the upside, I do not invest in meat-packing companies, fishing companies or companies that manufacture fishing trawlers, nets, or guns,” says Shah, who has been investing on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) since 1991. “Anyone who condones or incites violence is as guilty as the person actually committing the violent act.”

Shah is a strict adherent of ahimsa, the philosophy of non-violence. But unearthing investment-worthy companies that meet his criteria can be a difficult process-not to mention subjective.

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Tata: Master of the gentle approach

The Indian giant has found a way to acquire companies across the globe — and still tread lightly. Manjeet Kripalani in BusinessWeek:

 Ravi Kant was shocked. As head of commercial vehicles at India’s Tata Motors, Kant had traveled to the Korean port city of Gunsan to examine the failing Daewoo conglomerate’s truck division, which was being auctioned. When Kant asked a midlevel Daewoo manager which bidder he preferred, the Korean replied that a European suitor would best secure his company’s future. “I realized we had to change our entire strategy,” Kant recalls, “and tell the Koreans what Tata was about.”

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In India, Dow Jones meets Dharma

A new set of indices measuring such characteristics as good governance and eco-friendliness is winning favor with investors and gurus alike. Nandini Lakshman in BusinessWeek.

India’s superstar swamis: A slide show

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Indian sage who taught transcendental meditation to the Beatles, died in the Netherlands on Feb. 5. Back in India, a new generation of gurus is promoting the latest thing to hit the Indian stock market: values investing. Not to be confused with Warren Buffett-style value investing, values-based investing draws on the principles of Indian religions such as Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism, and Buddhism. Last month Dow Jones launched the faith-based Dow Jones Dharma indices, which measure the performance of 254 companies that have characteristics like good governance and environmental friendliness in common.

Letters are pouring in to support the new group of five indices. They are not your typical congratulatory notes, but blessings and endorsements from assorted Indian spiritual leaders and scholars.

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Indian BPOs facing undersea conspiracy?

In Hindustan Times:

Is India’s BPO industry facing an information blackout threat from undersea sabotage? That might sound like a plot from a James Bond movie. While the facts are not clear, the fears are.

Five undersea cable disruptions in less than a fortnight have sent shivers down the spine of the country’s thriving business process outsourcing industry. They have raised questions on the back-up available for the telecom lifeline of the industry that employs more than six lakh people and exports about $10 billion-worth services.

Even as repairs were on at the site of an Internet cable cut in the Persian Gulf and another two north of Egypt in the previous week, news came last Monday of a fourth cut in the same region that disrupted voice traffic Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. A fifth cut was reported later from near Penang in Malaysia.

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In the making: The other Indian Monopoly

Funskool is gearing up for launch Monopoly’s Indian edition. The cities and towns were selected on the basis of a poll of more than a million people. Gouri Shah in Mint.

They’ve bought and sold Pall Mall and Park Lane. Now, Indian players of Monopoly, the famous Parker Brothers board game that debuted in 1935 with a version featuring streets of Atlantic City of the US, can trade in real estate they are more familiar with-Indian cities.
Funskool India Ltd, the toy company that sells popular board game brands such as Scrabble and Monopoly in the country, is readying to launch the Indian edition of Monopoly by June.

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Seven million ‘Taj Mahals’ to bloom in India

MR Venkatesh in The Telegraph, Calcutta.

Seven million Taj Mahals are set to bloom in India but the “dark red” ode to love is unlikely to add fragrance to the romance of a home-grown Shah Jahan or Mumtaz.

Asia’s largest floriculture park Tanflora has won from a Dutch breeder “exclusive rights” to grow a new variety of rose they have christened Taj Mahal, but primarily for export. Tanflora managing director Najeeb Ahmed said by next year, the park would have “75 lakh (7.5 million) rose stems” ready for export to Europe.

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Fab four CEOs score at Forbes wealth chart

Economic Times has the PTI agency story on its front page

STEEL tycoon Lakshmi Niwas Mittal and the Ambani brothers are among the 10 wealthiest CEOs in the world, according to Forbes. Mr Mittal is ranked the second-wealthiest CEO, followed by Mukesh Ambani (6th), Anil Ambani (7th) and Wipro chief Azim Premji (9th). Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett tops the list with a fortune of $52 billion. Arcelor Mittal chief LN Mittal has a net worth of $32 billion, while Mukesh Ambani and Anil Ambani have fortunes of $20.1 billion and $18.2 billion, respectively. Chief of IT bellwether Wipro Azim Premji has a net worth of $17.1 billion.

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Indian investors despair as shares fall

Fear and loathing on the Mumbai stock exchange reports Karishma Vaswani of BBC News

Investors in India are calling it a market meltdown. The drastic fall in the value of Indian shares took investors here by surprise.

Many gathered outside the Bombay Stock Exchange, gazing up at the screens flashing market numbers in stunned silence.

No one had expected the impact from falls in regional markets to be so pronounced in India.

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Pakistan’s rich list

This list of 44 of Pakistan’s richest people was posted at the blog Teeth Maestro and was compiled before Benazir Bhutto’s assassination.

Asif Ali Zardari (net worth £900 million) comes in at #2 and his ‘industry’ is listed as politics. His assets are said to come from kickbacks, including $200 m from Dassault for the purchase of 32 Mirage jets while his wife was Prime Minister. Nawaz Sharif along with Shahbaz Sharif weighs in at #4 after being forced to forfeit $9 m and other assets when he was deposed in 1999.

The list does not include Pakistan’s military millionaires (see post elsewhere on this site).

The post has generated a fair amount of debate and comment (including those on its authenticity), but for whatever it’s worth, here it is:

Short-listing Pakistan’s most influential business magnates or Groups has never been an easy task because there are the people who have been very powerful in nearly every regime that has held this country’s reins since the last 60 years and then we have had those seasonal species that maneuvered their voice to be heard better than most within the power corridors, but later vanished into the oblivion for one reason or the other. We have selected only those tycoons who have made their presence felt for a better part of country’s history, have earned consistently, have been setting up units at regular intervals or have been legends in stocks, currency or real estate business.

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The Tata invasion

James Surowiecki in the New Yorker

Americans are used to foreign cars—nearly half of us, after all, drive one—but no American has yet seen a vehicle bearing the brand name Tata Motors tooling along the highway. So when, a few weeks ago, news broke that this same Tata Motors, an Indian auto company, was close to buying Jaguar and Land Rover, the first reaction of many was “Who?” The implausibility of the bid was magnified when Tata rolled out its newest product, a tiny, stripped-down car that will sell for a mere twenty-five hundred dollars. The spectacle of a low-end specialist trying to buy a couple of established luxury brands looked to some like a cubic-zirconium peddler making a play for Tiffany.

Gone in 60 seconds: Reliance Power IPO

Anil Ambani speaks to Economic Times on powering India’s biggest IPO, his father, Dhirubhai Ambani and how he plans to celebrate

At 4.30 pm in Reliance Centre, headquarters of the ADAG group in Mumbai, Anil Ambani has run the course a few days ahead of the Mumbai Marathon — and in record time. So what does he have to say about India’s largest-ever IPO? “Gone in 60 seconds,” says Ambani Jr, walking around the room strutting his stuff (Rs 110,000 crore, no less). Dressed in ET-pink shirt, grey trousers and black moccasins, Anil Dhirubhai Ambani can barely hide his euphoria: “If you ask me, this is the beginning of the ADAG group,” he says, amidst congratulatory phone calls and smses.

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Family feud, India style

Asia Sentinel

Prosperity gets in the way of family and corporate relationships, writes Raju Bist

In the mid-1990s, when the Birla family, which ran India’s second-largest business group, was in the midst of a bitter division of assets, one young family member quipped that “blood is thicker than water. But profits are thicker than blood.” A decade later, the country’s fast-rising prosperity is causing even more confrontations.

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India driving

Hindustan Times

The launch of Tata’s Nano marks the beginning of the end of an India shaped only by the privileged few writes Barkha Dutt

 

If the travels of a country were to be chronicled by its cars, in the journey from the Ambassador to the Nano is, perhaps, the story of India’s evolution as a nation.    

When Hindustan Motors rolled out the first Ambassador Car in 1957 its sturdy body, rounded contours and Mother Earth simplicity immediately bagged it a place in our collective consciousness. Fifty years on, its unchanging form, plodding-yet-comfortable manner and homegrown efficiency has imbued the Ambassador with a sepia-tinted nostalgia. The ‘Amby’ may have been modelled on the Morris Oxford but for most of us, it is quintessentially and uniquely Indian and marks a milestone in our growth as an industrialised country.