Lord of the Links

My sojourn into the Spider's Web

Sunday, October 30, 2005

Unpeeling Apple's Nano

The article dissects the iPod Nano, to estimate the cost of its viscerals. It claims Apple earns over 50% margines on each Nano sold. Its collaboration with Cypress Semiconductors (for touch wheel), PortalPlayer (for audio-chips), and Samsung (for flash memory) seemed to have greatly cut costs. Samsung is said to be giving discounts of over 40% to Apple.

The market is rife with the feeling that there is going to be major consolidation with only 2-3 players remaining.
|| crawled by kpowerinfinity, 5:28 am || link || (0) comments |

Friday, October 28, 2005

India helps Boeing fly into the future

Finally the world wakes up to Indian scientific proficience. Boeing has tried up with iISc Bangalore for a joint R&D program. The program has been facilitated by the Society for Innovation and Development at IISc.

The program would use IISc's scientific dexterity for projects to teh tune of 50 000$ annually. It is a great opportunity to prove India's scientific worth to the world, which we should not squander away at any cost.
|| crawled by kpowerinfinity, 5:44 pm || link || (0) comments |

Vodafone buys 10% stake in Bharti

Vodafone bought 10% in Bharti Televentures Ltd. for $1.5bn, the largest acquisition in India till date. With this deal Warburg Pincus sold off all of its state in Bharti.

The deal is a hallmark in Indian Telecom Industry, because it marks the coming of age of the industry and of foreign players becoming interested in investment in India.

What remains to be seen is what would be the long term goals of Vodafone vis-a-vis BTVL.
|| crawled by kpowerinfinity, 5:39 pm || link || (0) comments |

Monday, October 24, 2005

What's with Mukesh Ambani & fruits?

Suddenly the top bosses of every top Indian corporate are talking the agri language:

Mukesh Ambani talking fruits and vegetables. Rakesh Mittal crowing over his crop of okra. Abhiram Seth planning rows of citrus cultivation. Ajay Shriram chortling over crushing sugarcane. Vineet Chhabra going ecstatic over gherkins. Planning their retirement? Turning gentlemen farmers?


So we have Mukesh Ambani, Sunil Mittal (in a JV with Rothschild), Ajay Shriram of DCM Shriram, Ballarpur Industries (BILT paper), ITC, PepsiCo -- you name it -- talking about agri farming. They plan to help shift farmers from cereals to cash crops such as citrus, tomatoes and even mangoes (yummy!). It will both help farmers increase their incomes as well as reduce the pressure on our granaries.
|| crawled by kpowerinfinity, 5:05 am || link || (0) comments |

Sunday, October 23, 2005

India: A Quiet Shopping Spree

Indian acquisitions abroad have started to snowball. This BW article informs how India is gradually catching up with the international M&A game:

China raised a storm of controversy in the U.S. earlier this year when its cash-rich corporations announced their intention to acquire several American companies, including oil producer Unocal Corp. and appliance maker Maytag Corp. (MYG ). But while China was bidding for -- and losing -- overseas acquisitions, another big Asian country, India, was also investing abroad, but with a minimum of rancor.

Indian companies, which had a very small presence in foreign locales just a few years ago, have inked 62 overseas deals worth $1.38 billion so far this year, buying up a variety of foreign outfits, from engineering design house INCAT International in Britain to Valeant Pharma in the U.S. That compares with just $202 million in deals in 2002. The Indian purchases have flown under the political radar because most of them are small -- the average price of recent Indian acquisitions is just $30 million -- and they usually don't involve big-name companies.


The writer attributes the success to the opening up of the economy, boom in the private sector, and the unabated supply of skilled engineers and graduates. The writer also names the Tata and AV Birla group as being on the forefront of international M&A activity.

We can only expect more exciting times ahead.
|| crawled by kpowerinfinity, 5:40 am || link || (0) comments |

Online Extra: Google's Search for Simplicity

Google may adopt a more livelier homepage, because even though its minimalist design has been hugely popular, it needs to popularize its bouquet of services which is suffering due to the hyperlinks not being present on the home page.

Despite this roiling change, Google's famously minimalist home page looks almost as it did when the upstart search company owned just 1% of the market. Consider this: Five years ago, Google's home page contained 50 words, 11 links, and zero ads. Today, it contains 49 words, 17 links, and zero ads.


Froogle is way behind Yahoo! Shopping, and even Gmail and Google Talk dont have anywhere near the number of subscribers as the alternate email services.
|| crawled by kpowerinfinity, 5:33 am || link || (0) comments |

Saturday, October 22, 2005

Watch out! TCS is on prowl

TCS is going great guns in the international market with a new understanding with Pearl Plc. where it takes over its back-office operations, and buying out an Australian financial consulting company.

Numbers show that TCS is much larger than its rivals outside of India, and is much more global.
|| crawled by kpowerinfinity, 9:23 am || link || (0) comments |

Saturday, October 01, 2005

World's fastest growing brands

The article lists some of the fastest growing brands in the world. As expected, 7 out of 10 are related technology. The brands are Apple, Blackberry, Google, Amazon, Yahoo, eBay, Red Bull, Starbucks, Pixar, and Coach.
|| crawled by kpowerinfinity, 2:09 am || link || (0) comments |