State-owned Life Insurance Corp of India (LIC) will likely slow stock purchases for the rest of the fiscal year after nearly doubling its equity market investments in the first half from a year earlier. LIC, with assets of 27.26 trillion rupees ($423.3 billion) as of end-September, had a target of investing 500 billion rupees in stocks through the year which ends in March. During the first six months of that period, LIC’s stock market investments more than doubled from a year earlier to 392.24 billion rupees. As of end-November it had bought equities worth about 440 billion rupees, top executives said. They added they would look at opportunities to take some profit off the table.

Export-oriented auto manufacturers like Ford India, Nissan and Volkswagen are suffering as the current goods and services tax (GST) system of making payments upfront and claiming input tax credit is not working properly. According to industry estimates the stuck amount is around Rs 1,000 crore as these manufacturers have not been able to file claims since July. Industry executives explained that for export-oriented auto firms, there are two mechanisms to expunge tax content in exports.

KOLKATA: The Idea-Vodafone merger is likely to close faster, as early as next March-April, six months before the more conservative September 2018 timeline recently suggested by Vodafone Group CEO Vittorio Colao.

“Management expects all approvals for the merger to come in by March/April 2018,” Bank of America-Merrill Lynch said in a note, citing its recent meeting with the Idea Cellular leadership. ET has seen a copy of this note.

BSE benchmark Sensex ended over 67 points down in volatile trade today as cautious investors trimmed their portfolios ahead of RBI's policy announcement amid subdued macro cues.

The Reserve Bank's two-day monetary policy review kicked off today. The central bank is widely expected to keep policy rates unchanged tomorrow and will stay focused on controlling inflation, experts said.

The Indian government’s fraud case against tycoon Vijay Mallya is baseless and politically motivated, his defence lawyer told a London court on Tuesday as she battled to prevent his extradition to his home country.

Mallya, who lives in Britain, stands accused in India of fraudulently palming off losses from his now defunct Kingfisher Airlines onto banks by taking out loans he had no intention of repaying.

Two major Chinese lenders plan to support a move by China Development Bank to put Indian wireless carrier Reliance Communications (RCom) into insolvency court as they seek to recover about $2 billion in debt, said three people with knowledge of the matter.

Last month, CDB began insolvency proceedings against RCom, which has been trying for months to restructure its debt via a debt-for-equity swap. Now, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), the country's biggest-listed lender by assets, and Export-Import Bank of China, plan to back CDB, the sources said.

Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Tuesday cautioned the "users, holders and traders" of Bitcoins about the security related risks associated in dealing with such virtual currencies (VCs).

The apex bank reiterated its stand that "it has not given any licence or authorisation to any entity or company to operate such schemes or deal with Bitcoin or any VC".

The Madras High Court has dismissed a PIL seeking to restrain the Tamil Nadu government from observing former chief minister J Jayalalithaa's death anniversary today.

The first bench of Chief Justice Indira Banerjee and Justice R Hemalatha dismissed the petition by one R Kumaravel seeking to restrain the state government from observing December 5 as the death anniversary of Jayalalithaa.

Ad wars in the automotive space are quite common in Europe and US but not so much in India. That, however, doesn't mean that things are completely boring here. Siddhartha Lal, CEO, Eicher Motors, recently tweeted that Royal Enfield's sales are equivalent to the global sales of Harley-Davidson, KTM, BMW, Triumph and Ducati combined. Yes, he actually said that! Rajiv Bajaj, Managing Director, Bajaj Auto, responded to the tweet through a statement to Business Standard, saying "By measuring solely on the basis of volumes at the exclusion of pricing power, it would seem that Maruti Suzuki is above and beyond brands like Mercedes, BMW, Audi and Porsche put together."

New Delhi: Tech giant Google on Tuesday unveiled a slew of new solutions, such as Android Oreo Go edition for low-cost smartphones and a bike mode for Maps, aimed at driving Internet adoption across markets, including India.

The company has also worked with Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Jio to bring a customised version of Google Assistant (virtual assistant) to the latter’s smart feature phones. Caesar Sengupta, vice-president, Next Billion Users, said Google’s India-first suite of products and features are aimed to help more people discover how the Internet can make life easier and more convenient.

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