40% revenue to come from delivery in 3-6 months: FoodPanda

Food ordering platform FoodPanda has forayed into food delivery segment in the country and expects about 40 percent of its revenues in 3-6 months to come from the new offering.

The company has started the service in five cities and plans to expand it to 10-12 cities by the end of the year.

"An important part of the user experience, apart from the quality of the food, is the delivery. This is what we want to sort out. We will offer delivery of food on behalf of our partners (restaurants) for a fee," FoodPanda India CEO Saurabh Kochhar said.

He further said: "We are still testing out the revenue model (in India) for this whether it will be fixed or order-based, but we expect the delivery business to contribute about 40 percent to the revenues in the next 3-6 months from 20 percent currently." Kochhar added that this service will help partners who do not have a delivery set-up as well as those who are looking at reducing their delivery costs. 

The programme is running in five cities (Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Pune and Bangalore) and will be expanded to 10-12 cities by year-end, Kochhar said.

He declined to comment on the investment details for the new offering saying it has not "parked a separate amount for this". It did not disclose its revenue numbers either.

FoodPanda, which has a presence in 39 countries, offers delivery in markets like Vietnam, Bangladesh and Singapore, where its restaurant partners do not have their own delivery set up. According to Kochhar, food delivery in India is a USD 15 billion market and only a fraction of that is online. FoodPanda has hired about 500 people for delivering food.

"We will ramp up this number to about 2,000 in the next 3-6 months as the business scales up," he said.

FoodPanda has over 12,000 restaurants across 200 cities on board its platform. Its investors include investment firm Rocket Internet (52 per cent stake), Phenomen Ventures, Investment AB Kinnevik and iMENA Holdings. 

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Avaya eyes India's smart city push in expansion bid

As the government makes a push for smart cities, global companies are lining up for opportunities that India will provide in the coming years. US IT major Avaya is all geared up to cash in on smart cities while simultaneously expanding its operations in India.

In a proposition to expand its Research and Development (R&D) facilities in India, Avaya recently acquired Knoahsoft, in Hyderabad.

This latest acquisition will give Avaya its third-largest R&D center in Hyderabad after Bangalore and Pune. The Rs 300-crore acquisition is important for Avaya, which is aggressively chasing opportunities in Indian market.

India, being one of the largest BPOs, can be an efficient site to expand Avaya's operator network, the firm's President and CEO Kevin J Kennedy told CNBC-TV18 in an interview.

Below is the edited transcript of the interview.

Q: How are you performing in India?

A: We have very large epicenter of R&D here. We will continue to migrate in small amounts, but important amounts of R&D and principally because of the leadership we have been able to find in India which has been nothing short of excellent.

Both in sales, service as well as R&D. We have also been doing some Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A). Very recently bought a small company. While it's a US company, its entire R&D was here. I think that's the trend you'll continue to see in the FY16 as well.

Q: We know that you are pitching for RIL's telecom and other industries. What sort of industries are you looking at?

A: Avaya is blessed with 70 percent market share of all contact centers in the world wide. India because of it's legacy in the last ten years is of course one of the largest BPOs and so the concentration of opportunities for us to upgrade people here is something we want to be focusing on for next 5 years. So it's not just about one operator, it's about many operators.

Q: Talk about your growth strategy. What sort of growth trajectory are you looking at. Will it be organic growth or are mergers and acquisition on the card?

A: In the near term my focus is on making the best technology that can be made and make it highly integrated so we focus on being open where some of our competitors are proprietary. Secondly, we focus on mobile world as oppose to a desktop world.

Of course the market place like India with the youth and scale is a mobile marketplace and third we focused on this word engagement as opposed to just making legacy applications more productive and so those are really the three signatures that we are bringing to the market and we are going to test all that works great in a smart city and digital world.

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Ola raises funds, aims to be in 200 cities by year end: CEO

The company will be launching newer categories and taking some of its existing categories into the 100 cities where it is currently present.

India's largest cab aggregator Ola Cabs is speeding on the growth highway. After raising USD 210 million in October and acquiring rival Taxi-For-Sure last month, the Bangalore-based company has now raised USD 400 million in series 'E' funding from new and existing investors. CNBC-TV18's Farah Bookwala Vhora caught up with Ola Cabs' co-founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal to understand how the latest shot in the arm will aid the company's ambitious plans.

Below is verbatim transcript of the interview:

Q: Can you share the details related to your latest funding?

A: Today, we are announcing a USD 410 million series E fund raise led by DST Global which is Yuri Milner's firm and also GIC which is Singapore's sovereign wealth fund which participated along with Falcon Edge. These are the three new investors and SoftBank and Steadview and Tiger Global and Accel US have participated from our existing investor base.

Q: Where does this value the company today because last time around when you raised about USD 200 million, there were talks about you being valued at USD 1 billion plus at that point?

A: We do not share valuations publicly. We raised our last round in October, USD 210 million from Softbank and since then we have seen huge amount of growth. We have seen multiple levels of growth and the valuation is also inline with that growth.

Q: Where will you utilise this latest round of funding that you have been able to raise, where are you going to allocate these funds?

A: Predominantly two areas. One is into deepening our reach across the country and also going deeper into existing cities. Right now we are in 100 cities; we aim to be in 200 cities by the end of this year.

We will be launching newer categories and taking some of our existing categories into the existing 100 cities also like auto rickshaws will be expanding aggressively. Secondly, on technology we will be investing very deeply in increasing our engineering strength and Bangalore is where we have our engineering centre, we will be investing a lot in that.

Q: Is there any intention to list Ola Cabs, any time in the future either in India or overseas?

A: Right now we are focused on growth. We are still very early in our life cycle. We are a four year old company and are growing very fast, there is a lot of opportunity to grow into and that is our focus right now. At the right time listing will make sense, it is not in our immediate agenda.

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Cairn India vs Taxman case hearing begins

The Delhi High Court has begun hearing the Rs 20,000 crore tax battle between Cairn India and the tax department. The taxman is alleging that Cairn India did not pay capital gains tax when shares changed hands in the financial year 2007.

The Delhi High Court has begun hearing the Rs 20,000 crore tax battle between  Cairn India and the tax department. The taxman is alleging that Cairn India did not pay capital gains tax when shares changed hands in the financial year 2007. Cairn is refuting these charges. Ashmit Kumar reports

The entire issue pertains to the transaction whereby CUHL that is Cairns UK Holdings Company had transferred its Indian assets to Cairn India which the tax department is seeking to target. It is claiming that this transaction results in capital gains of Rs 24,000 crore in the hands of Cairn UK. Cairn India, represented by Harish Salve argues that the Indian government is trying to invoke the retrospective taxation that was provided for in 2012. He went on to argue that there is no question of capital gains arising out of this transaction or an unreasonable delay. They were served with a notice in 2014, so there is a reasonable delay. Salve also went on to argue that this is a case of oppressive use of force.

In response, the government said that as per their assessment, CUHL has already made capital gains of Rs 24,000 crore. They have been served with a notice and they have admitted to these capital gains. Government also went on to argue that the High Court is not the appropriate forum that if one has to challenge the tax demand it has to be challenged before the Dispute Resolution Panel (DRP) and not directly before the High Court. So it is not the appropriate forum. 

Also it is important to add here that the government by way of a January 2014 order has already frozen shares to the extent of Rs 4,200 crore of Cairn India. So the government is right now seeking some kind of payment back in India at least as a kind of initial payment and that is subject matter of further debate. We will find further discussion and argument between the two heavyweights on April 22, that is when the case gets taken up again.

Cairn India stock price

On April 16, 2015, Cairn India closed at Rs 236.10, up Rs 8.20, or 3.60 percent. The 52-week high of the share was Rs 385.00 and the 52-week low was Rs 209.30.

The company's trailing 12-month (TTM) EPS was at Rs 21.98 per share as per the quarter ended December 2014. The stock's price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio was 10.74. The latest book value of the company is Rs 206.66 per share. At current value, the price-to-book value of the company is 1.14.

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MakeMyTrip initiates to encourage visitors to Kashmir

Online travel firm MakeMyTrip is wooing domestic tourists to Kashmir offering attractive packages as it supports the state government to bring back travellers to the valley hit hard by floods last year and recent unseasonal rains.

"The valley is ready to welcome tourists and we assure travellers that a trip to Kashmir is as convenient, delightful and memorable as it was before the floods," MakeMyTrip Chief Business Officer Holidays- Ranjeet Oak told PTI.

Holiday business in the valley was growing at an average of 45 per cent year-on-year and MakeMyTrip expects business to regain lost ground due to floods, he added.

The floods in the valley last year had led to a slowdown in the number of tourists to the valley and had impacted the economy.

"We are looking at a growth of around 45 per cent in number of travellers visiting Kashmir in 2015. In 2014, the Kashmir valley (excluding Ladakh) had 35,000 travellers visiting the state," Oak said.

In order to woo tourists, the company is providing a slew offers for travellers to visit Kashmir, such as 6 days and 7 nights package, covering Srinagar, Gulmarg, Pahalgam and Sonmarg for Rs 24,999 from Delhi.

It is also available from Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Kolkata, Chennai, Hyderabad, Indore and Baroda. Currently, Delhi and Mumbai contribute nearly 60 per cent of all queries received for Kashmir, MakeMyTrip said.

Speaking on the sideline of an event organised to showcase the ground situation in the state, Oak said it was only when tourism in Kashmir is whole-heartedly supported that the region and local economy would grow on a steady path.

MakeMyTrip had also held a vendor-training programme in Kashmir training over a hundred people (drivers, shikara- wallahs, hotel-staff and tour-escorts) in March this year. 

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Govt owes around Rs 600 cr to Air India for VVIP travel

Air India is surviving on a bailout package approved in 2012. Besides a debt of Rs 40,000 crore, the airline had reported losses to the tune of Rs 5,388 crore in FY-14 as against Rs 5,490 in the fiscal 2012-13.

Government owes around Rs 600 crore to Air India for using its aircraft for travel of VVIPs. The Ministry of Civil Aviation has taken up the issue with various ministries regarding the pending amount related to the services of Air India aircraft availed for such VVIP travel.

According to official sources, Ministries of Home Affairs and External Affairs, among others, have accrued "Rs 500-600 crore" dues till March 31. "These are dues to be paid to Air India for using aircraft for travel of VVIPs," a source said.

Air India is surviving on a bailout package approved in 2012. The erstwhile UPA dispensation had in April 2012 approved Air India's turnaround plan, with a committed public funding of Rs 30,231 crore, staggered over a period of nine years, with some specific riders. 

Besides a debt of Rs 40,000 crore, the airline had reported losses to the tune of Rs 5,388 crore in FY-14 as against Rs 5,490 in the fiscal 2012-13. After a streak of losses, Air India had reported a net profit of Rs 14.6 crore in December last year, from a loss of Rs 168.7 crore in the corresponding period of 2013.

The airline in its budget estimates for this fiscal, presented late last month, has forecast that it would become operationally profitable by March next year, much ahead of the TAP projections. 

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SBI Card's valuation begins as partner GE Caps plans exit

SBI, the nation's largest lender, entered the credit card business in 1998 by roping in GE Capital India, consumer finance arm of GE Capital. GE Capital owns 40 percent stake, and the remaining stake is with SBI.

With its long-time joint venture partner GE Capital deciding to exit the financing business globally, SBI  Card has started a valuation exercise for a possible new investor or a public offer.

"We have started a formal valuation exercise to arrive at our current market value. The exercise may take a month from now to complete," SBI Cards & Payment Services (SBI Card) chief executive Vijay Jasuja told PTI over phone from Gurgaon.

SBI, the nation's largest lender, entered the credit card business in 1998 by roping in GE Capital India, consumer finance arm of GE Capital. GE Capital owns 40 percent stake, and the remaining stake is with SBI.

SBI Card has around 3 million active credit cards in circulation, making it the third largest player in the sector after HDFC Bank  and ICICI Bank  with a market share of 15 percent in FY15.

Parent SBI could not be contacted for comments as calls made to managing director and group executive for associates and subsidiaries V G Kannan remained unanswered. Jasuja said the company is weighing three options.

"First, SBI can buy back the entire 40 percent stake of GE Capital. Second, it can be sold to another investor through a private placement. Third, we can go in for a public issue."

However, he maintained that "as per the agreement reached between SBI and GE Capital at the time of formation of SBI Card joint venture, it was decided that whenever any party decides to exit JV, the decision has to be on the basis of mutual understanding."

Currently, SBI Card's board has eight members, three of them from GE Capital. "We already have a base of 30 lakh cardholders.

However, we are eyeing more than 10 crore customer base of SBI Group," Jasuja said. 

HDFC Bank stock price

On April 15, 2015, HDFC Bank closed at Rs 1030.40, down Rs 7.75, or 0.75 percent. The 52-week high of the share was Rs 1105.00 and the 52-week low was Rs 707.50.

The company's trailing 12-month (TTM) EPS was at Rs 38.84 per share as per the quarter ended December 2014. The stock's price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio was 26.53. The latest book value of the company is Rs 173.55 per share. At current value, the price-to-book value of the company is 5.94.

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Satyam case: Special court reserves order on Raju's appeal

Raju and seven others had filed the appeal in the Metropolitan Sessions Court on April 13 seeking to set aside the trial court's judgement and had also sought bail in the case.

A Metropolitan Sessions Court here today reserved its order till April 20 on an appeal filed by B Ramalinga Raju and others challenging a special court's verdict which found them guilty in the multi-crore rupee accounting fraud in erstwhile Satyam Computer Services Ltd.

Raju, along with seven others, had filed the appeal in the Metropolitan Sessions Court on April 13 seeking to set aside the special court's (trial court's) judgement. They had also sought bail in the case.

The matter was then posted for today. The court heard the arguments by the defense counsel for deciding the maintainability of (appeal) of these cases (whether it should be heard) before a sessions court or High Court.

After hearing the arguments, the court posted the matter to April 20 for delivering its orders on the appeal.

On April 9, a special court trying the SCSL accounting fraud probed by CBI, had sentenced Raju and nine others to seven years' rigorous imprisonment finding them guilty of criminal conspiracy as well as cheating, among other offences, in the scam and also imposed a Rs 5.5 crore fine on Raju and his brother Rama Raju.

Raju is lodged in Cherlapally Central Prison here, along with nine others, since April 9.  

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Petrol price cut by 80 p, diesel to be cheaper by Rs 1.30

This makes it the second reduction in fuel prices this month. Prices of petrol and diesel were last revised downwards on April 2, by Rs. 0.49/litre and Rs. 1.21/litre, respectively (including state levies).

Moneycontrol Bureau

The price of petrol was cut by 0.80 paise per litre and that of diesel was decreased by Rs 1.30 with effect from Wednesday midnight, the Indian Oil Corporation  said in a release.

With this change, petrol will now cost Rs 59.20/litre in Delhi, while diesel price will come down to Rs 47.20/litre (Delhi).

This makes it the second reduction in fuel prices this month. Prices of petrol and diesel were last revised downwards on April 2, by Rs. 0.49/litre and Rs. 1.21/litre, respectively (including state levies). Since last price change, the trend of international prices of petrol & diesel and the rupee-dollar exchange rate warrant a further downward revision in prices, the impact of which is being passed on to the consumers with this price decrease, said IOC in the release.

"The movement of prices in international oil market and INR-USD exchange rate shall continue to be closely monitored and developing trends of the market will be reflected in future price changes," it added

IOC stock price

On April 15, 2015, Indian Oil Corporation closed at Rs 372.75, down Rs 4.5, or 1.19 percent. The 52-week high of the share was Rs 410.90 and the 52-week low was Rs 258.80.

The company's trailing 12-month (TTM) EPS was at Rs 34.50 per share as per the quarter ended December 2014. The stock's price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio was 10.8. The latest book value of the company is Rs 271.80 per share. At current value, the price-to-book value of the company is 1.37.

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Cleartrip pulls out of Internet.org, backs net neutrality

Details of the decision to withdraw from Internet.org, which was launched in February this year in India, could not come through as an e-mail query went unanswered.

Online travel services provider Cleartrip today pulled out of Facebook- and Reliance Communications-promoted platform internet.org as the debate over Net neutrality widens, a day after Flipkart walked out from Airtel Zero.

"Time to draw a line in the sand, Cleartrip is pulling out of Internet.org and standing up for #NetNeutrality," Cleartrip said on microblogging site Twitter.

Details of the decision to withdraw from Internet.org, which was launched in February this year in India, could not come through as an e-mail query went unanswered.

Earlier in the day, Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg rejected criticism that the internet.org programme, which has RCom as a partner in India, was against the concept of Net neutrality.

"For people who are not on the Internet though, having some connectivity and some ability to share is always much better than having no ability to connect and share at all. That's why programmes like internet.org are important and can co-exist with Net neutrality regulations," he said.

Internet.org is a Facebook-led initiative which states that it aims to bring 5 billion people online in partnership with tech giants like Samsung and Qualcomm.

Facebook's partnership with Reliance Communications  to provide free Internet access to 33 websites as part of its internet.org initiative has raised eyebrows, with free Internet activists saying it violates the idea of Net neutrality.

The debate in India has been triggered by mobile operator Airtel introducing an open marketing platform, Airtel Zero, and TRAI's consultation paper on whether telecom firms can be allowed to charge different rates for Internet data like e-mail, browsing and use of apps like Whatsapp, Viber and Sky.

Net neutrality implies equal treatment for all Internet traffic and no priority given to an entity or company based on payment to service providers like telecom companies, which is seen as discriminatory.

Yesterday, Flipkart founder Sachin Bansal said: "After looking in deeper, we realised that Net neutrality can get compromised in future, which we are not supportive of at all."

Reliance Comm stock price

On April 15, 2015, Reliance Communications closed at Rs 72.15, down Rs 0.85, or 1.16 percent. The 52-week high of the share was Rs 156.90 and the 52-week low was Rs 56.90.

The latest book value of the company is Rs 126.97 per share. At current value, the price-to-book value of the company was 0.57.

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