At the annual general meeting of cigarettes-to-hotels major ITC on last Friday (July 31), chairman Y C Deveshwar came down hard on what he described as a restrictive regime for the domestic tobacco industry. In the process, Deveshwar informed shareholders of his "back-up" plan — a diversification exercise he initiated over a decade ago — to derisk the cigarette business. The latter gives ITC 40 per cent of its revenues and 85 per cent of its profits.

This initiative, which is a foray into fast moving consumer goods (called FMCG others by the company; here referred to as FMCG), is becoming critical to ITC as regulatory and taxation issues impact cigarette volumes.

New Delhi: HCL Technologies Ltd, India’s fourth-largest software exporter, on Monday posted a decline of 2.8% in its net income to Rs.1,783 crore for the three months ended June compared with the year-ago period.

Net sales rose 16.1% to Rs.9,777 crore compared with the same period last year. Sequentially, net profit rose 5.9%, while revenue grew 5.5% over the same period. In dollar terms, net profit was $279 million, an 8.8% decrease over a year ago, on revenue of $1.53 billion, up 9.3%.

Cash-rich Coal India (CIL) is unlikely to be affected by World Bank's decision to limit investment. The miner has been funding projects from internal accruals and is confident of doing so in the future.

World Bank, which in the late 1990's had announced to lend $1.03 billion to Coal India along with a Japanese lending agency, recently announced that it would not be funding the sector, as such companies "have pushed back efforts to fight climate change by arguing fossil fuels are a cure to energy poverty, which is holding back developing countries".

None of the players involved in the deal has agreed to comment on the matter.

Nokia, the mobile phone making moghul of the yesteryears, is offloading its maps business so as to focus on integrating its 15.6 billion euro purchase of Alcatel Lucent, the deal which would give a significant boost to the market share of Nokia, making it the world’s second largest network equipment maker.

Infuse Ventures, India’s sustainability and clean technology fund backed by IIM Ahmedabad’s technology business incubator CIIE (Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship) has announced an undisclosed amount of investment in Glowship.com. Glowship is an online marketplace platform for energy and environment related products, solutions & services.

Launched in 2015, the Glowship marketplace platform aims to provide consumers an access to a wide range of products and solutions in the energy and environment category.

Maruti Suzuki India shares gained over 2 per cent in the afternoon trade on Monday after the car maker had reported robust sales figure for the month of July on August 1.

Maruti Suzuki India sold a total of 1,21,712 units in July 2015, a growth of 20.1 per cent. This include 1,10,405 units in the domestic market and 11,307 units in exports.

The BSE Sensex continued to trade in the positive terrain and was trading over 100 points up on Monday despite muted Asian markets.

At 2.14 pm, Sensex was up 117.06 points at 28,231.62. Similarly, Nifty was up 24.75 points at 8,557.60 during the same time.

Snapdeal and HDFC Bank launched India's first co-branded e-commerce credit card in partnership with Visa today. The three year partnership aims to encourage more customers from tier 2 and 3 markets to adapt to digital payments.

"Over 70% of Snapdeal’s customers are from the tier 2 and 3 geographies, yet these markets account for a miniscule percentage of card payments.

On a day when the government has called an all-party meeting to break the deadlock in the Parliament, opposition Congress decided to further up the ante. The charge was led by none other than Congress President Sonia Gandhi who launched a scathing attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi and said PM has turned out to be a master re-packager, a skillful salesman and a sharp headline grabber.

Bajaj Auto today registered a 3% increase in total sales in July at 3,30,231 units against 3,19,292 in the same month of 2014.

Motorcycle sales during the month rose 5% to 2,82,433 units as against 2,67,841 in July last year, the company said in a BSE filing.

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