India look to Devvarman with hope – 1

A positive attitude, strong legs and practice sessions with Andy Roddick have turned Somdev Devvarman into the new hope of Indian tennis.

 

 

 

Devvarman jumped 48 places up the world rankings this week after reaching his first ATP Tour final in Chennai.

“Somdev’s biggest strengths are his legs and his head,” said twice Wimbledon quarter-finalist Vijay Amritraj as he commentated on the tournament. “It’s a good sign.”

Devvarman, who turned professional last year and is India’s highest-ranked player, said during the event that his recent improvement was due to a three-week practice session with American former world number one Roddick in December.

His  coach says his biggest asset is his attitude.

“He may lose matches but never, ever have I seen him giving up,” Jacek Wolicki said last week.

ROBUST DISPLAY

The 23-year-old Devvarman, who is based in the United States, rose to 154 in the world after beating former world number one Carlos Moya and world number 25 Ivo Karlovic on his way to his first ATP final.

Wildcard Devvarman produced a robust display against Croatian Marin Cilic, ranked 27th last week, before being beaten 6-4, 7-6 in the final.

“This is what we’ve been looking for so many years now… This boy is a real find for us,” doubles specialist Mahesh Bhupathi told the Times of India newspaper.

Bhupathi was one half of the “Indian Express” doubles team with Leander Paes which rose to number one in the world in 1999.

Atlanta Olympics bronze medallist Paes remains the last Indian to have won an ATP singles title, in Newport in 1998, the year he reached his career-best singles ranking of 73 and the last year that India played in the Davis Cup World Group.

ref: thetimesofindia 

Vibrant Gujarat investor summit takes off

Good morning friends.  It was being told that 15 private executive class jets parked at the airport.  Airport officials said even the newly-extended apron of old international building was totally occupied. Movement of routine aircraft was delayed by 10 to 15 minutes because of heavy traffic.   

Private jets were jostling for space over Ahmedabad’s skies on Monday morning when Vibrant Gujarat investor summit took off.  Officials at Air Traffic Control (ATC) had a busy time handling unscheduled flights. Around the time when summit was being inaugurated, there were 15 private executive class jets parked at the airport.

Besides there were four choppers in the parking. At one point, ATC Officials began to permit them at an interval of 10 minutes and each jet was cleared to fly 2000 feet below the first one, to avoid a mishap.

Airport officials said that if the first jet was given permission to fly at 28,000 feet, another one was given permission to fly at 26,000 feet and third at 24,000.

On an average, take off and landing movement of aircrafts is around 60 each, but on Monday, this shot up by 25 per cent increasing movement to around 75 landing and take off each.

They added that there was a parking space crunch as almost all aprons were totally packed. Ahmedabad Airport, after expansion, has the capacity to house 27 aircrafts and four jumbo aircrafts.

Officials said even the newly-extended apron of old international building was totally occupied. Because of heavy traffic, movement of routine aircraft was delayed by 10 to 15 minutes in the afternoon.

The movement of private executive jets continued till late night and at 9 pm, there were two jets, of which, one was scheduled to leave in the morning on Tuesday.

Officials said two choppers left for Jamnagar, probably flying Mukesh Ambani to Reliance refinery after the Vibrant inauguration. Officials said that majority of the private jets had come from Mumbai or Delhi and all were handled by private operators who usually managed the flight movement of the VIPs.

ref: thetimesofindia

Board task: New team, meeting working capital – 2

At present, Satyam has no cash reserves, despite the fact that the balance sheet prepared on March 31, 2008, shows a cash reserve of Rs 5,700 crore. To ensure smooth functioning of the company, a senior official said the company would require a new management, which could be trusted by clients and lenders, who have stopped giving Satyam money after the revealation of accounting fraud.

According to sources, interim CEO Ram Mynampati may be sacked. Government has criticized his role as a director, in its application to the Company Law Board (CLB), where it had sought permission to sack the earlier board.

While it’s unlikely that the new board will continue with Mynampati as CEO, at the same time, it will have to ensure that the new CEO must be aware of the functioning of the Satyam, having over 500 clients.

Parekh will also discuss availability of working capital for the company as it is facing acute financial crunch. It immediately needs credit from banks to continue operation. Because of fraud fiasco, banks are not ready to lend the company against receivables as collateral, saying it is very difficult to believe on the company’s statement as its balance sheet is under cloud.

Sources said that the board may decide to offer a seat to a bank, which will give it working capital. The board seat will give the bank inside information of its functioning and financial condition.

The board may also discuss appointment of remaining members. The government had sought permission from CLB to appoint 10 members, though it may not take the strength to 10. A senior official said the final number could be kept at five or seven.

The source added that as a first step, the government restricted itself to appointment of three members only, to avoid any clash of personality, which is crucial for smooth functioning of the board. So, government decided to select a core team first and later expand it. Some representation on the board could be given to institutional investors like Life Insurance Corporation.

 

ref:  thetimesofindia

Board task: New team, meeting working capital – 1

Good Morning Friends.  I may say that this is the right thing to do by the government.  As we all know that we all experiencing global crisis.  The government should made sure of restoring the  confidence in the clients and investors so that they  continue  their business without any hesitant. 

The task ahead for the new Satyam board is well cut out. In its first meeting in Hyderabad on Monday, the board will elect its chairman, find out a solution for creation of working capital and appoint new management of the company. 

The government on Sunday constituted a three-member board for Satyam. The members are HDFC chairman Deepak Parekh, former Nasscom president Kiran Karnik and former chief of Securities Appallate Tribunal C Achuthan.

The new board will meet with a mandate to “take necessary immediate action to put the company back on the road,” taking it out of the present crisis, which started after its chairman B Ramalinga Raju revealed fudging of its accounts last week.

In its first meeting, the board is likely to elect Deepak Parekh as its chairman. It is learnt that the government has already sounded the members about Parekh as chairman. The other members will be appointed by the government with the consultation of the chairman and other appointed board members.

“I am going to Hyderabad for the board meeting tomorrow,” Parekh said. The first task of the board is to restore confidence in the clients and investors to continue business with Satyam, he said, refusing to answer any further question.

ref:  thetimesofindia

 

 

 

 

The thread that binds India, Japan

Good Morning friends,

This is one thread that binds the Japanese and Gujaratis – the tie and dye technique of fabric printing. The shibori art dating back to the eight century uses the same resist techniques used by the bandhani artistes in Kutch and Jamnagar districts of Gujarat.

 

“The sanskrit word banda to tie’, is the root of bandhani while shibori uses the stitching’ technique of resisting,” says Samarth Firdaus, a shibori expert at the National Institute of Design (NID). If in bandhani, the artisan ties the portion of the cloth which is not to be dyed with a wax thread before dipping it in dye, the resisted portion is stitched and then pulled to make gathers in shibori, says Firdaus. Mainly used in kimonos, the shibori cloth is bound, resisted, wrapped and gathered by hand and this step is repeated for each colour dye it is dipped in. It is said that one kimono could take a year to make.

 

Angira Shah, who has trained Gujarati women in the traditional art of shibori, based in Ahmedabad says bandhani is older than shibori and was exported from India to Japan which mastered production, techniques in layout and design.

 

“Stitching in any case, came later,” says Firdaus. In 1997, NID hosted the second World Shibori Network conference here where it brought together artistes using both techniques and held demonstrations. Shibori experts from Nagoya in Japan too attended this conference.

The motifs in shibori are mostly based on nature, like birds and flowers, says Firdaus. “Now they have started using polyester mixed cotton to make the crush on the fabric permanent,” he says. Besides, the colours in bandhani are rich and bright while shibori uses subtle shades, he says.

 

Bandhani patterns are usually geometric clusters, but they also use traditional motifs, which also makes shibori more costly than bandhani..

 

“Nowadays, we can find shibori easily in Gujarat but they are crude versions. The Japanese went far ahead of us in this art and mastered it. In ancient times, our work was more meticulous and sharp,” says Shah.

 

According to her, Arimatsu village in Japan is known as shibori village which also has a museum. Even today, Arimatsu and Narumi in Nagoya prefecture remain the only main production centres in Japan, where over 100 varieties of shibori is practised.

 

News from times of india

The knowledge superpower – 4

At the system level, DRDO has been able to develop light compact aircraft Tejas and several types of missiles. The significance of these achievements has to be viewed against the stringent embargo regimes, which we faced over years.

These developments illustrate India’s ability to realise most complex and sophisticated engineering products and in many cases the world’s best like the remote sensing satellites. The engineering efforts in the early phase of India’s development in enterprises like steel, cement, locomotives, power and fertilizers continue to receive latest technology both from indigenous and imported know how.

So also is agriculture, which receives inputs from developments like genetic engineering and precision farming. Developments like Nano Car, an engineering marvel, represent another dimension.

The resultant repository of science and technology knowledge has certainly given India a unique position as an advanced country in the developing world. The sustained economic growth of 9 to 10% coupled with consolidation and expansion of S and amp;T foundations would lead India to be a world leader of 21st century.

Ref: thetimesofindia

Satyam Computers-Ramlinga Raju: A Rs 7,000 crore lie-2

The day after, Raju announced his ill-fated plan to shell out $1.6 billion to acquire his sons’ companies, Maytas Properties and Maytas Infra. It created such a furore that Raju was forced to backtrack. But what was widely seen as a move by Raju to bail out his sons was actually aimed at covering Satyam’s tracks through fictitious cash transfers (details inside).

 

The timing of what is being called `India’s Enron’ could not have come at a worse time – just when the stock market was showing signs of responding positively to the Centre and RBI’s moves to stimulate the economy through interest rate cuts, duty reductions and accelerated government spending. A day after the sensex crossed the 10,000-mark, it plunged by 749 points, wiping out almost Rs 1.3 lakh crore (or trillion) of market capitalization.

 

There’s intense speculation as to what finally triggered Raju’s confession of wrongdoing. It’s clearly more than coincidence that it came hot on the heels of investment banker DSP Merrill Lynch’s letter to the company on Tuesday evening (followed by another to Sebi this morning) terminating its 10-day-old agreement with Satyam to advise it on strategic options because of “material accounting irregularities”.

 

But the beginning of the end came when furious investors forced Raju to reverse his decision to acquire the two group companies (Maytas Properties and Maytas Infra), robbing him of his last chance to wriggle out of a very tight corner.

 

By the end of Wednesday, the knives were out with Sebi, the stock exchanges, the Indian Chartered Accountants Institute, the department of company affairs and institutional investors announcing/considering a flurry of probes/actions against Raju, Satyam and its auditors. NYSE has halted trading in Satyam ADRs (American Depository Receipts).

 

Fearing violence, the Hyderabad police threw a cordon around Satyam’s offices and Raju’s residence in upmarket Jubilee Hills even as the company’s wholetime director-now-interim CEO Ram Mynampati, after expressing “shock”, swung into damage control mode.

 

source: The Economic Times

Satyam Computers-Ramalinga Raju: A Rs 7,000 crore lie-1

Good Morning Friends, it is really hard for a individual to believe Satyam Computers news. Satyam Computers, one of India’s largest IT Company come up with India’s largest-ever corporate fraud. One question is just can’t go away from my mind whom to trust now and whom to not?

 

The irony lies in the name – Satyam, meaning truth. The real truth is that Ramalinga Raju, the politically-connected, 

promoter-chairman of Hyderabad-headquartered Satyam Computers, was lying for years to shareholders, employees and the world at large, building up to India’s largest-ever corporate fraud of over Rs 7,000 crore.

 

The country’s fourth largest IT company – after TCS, Infosys and Wipro and ahead of HCL – was for several years cooking its books by inflating revenues and profits, thus boosting its cash and bank balances; showing interest income where none existed; understating liability; and overstating debtors’ position (money due to it).

 

The 54-year-old US MBA Raju’s letter of guilt and resignation to the Satyam board and Sebi on Wednesday morning sledge-hammered India Inc, dumbfounded regulators, pummelled the company’s stock, knocked the bottom out of the market, and cast a long shadow over industry in general and the IT sector in particular.

 

It also raised disconcerting questions about corporate governance, the role of auditors (in this case Pricewaterhouse Coopers) and independent directors (Satyam has its share of luminaries such as ISB dean M Rammohan Rao, Krishna Palepu of Harvard Business School who resigned and former union cabinet secretary T R Prasad).

 

This wasn’t some small fly-by-night operator that had been caught out. Satyam is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, boasts 185 Fortune 500 companies on its client list and employs 53,000 people – that’s equal to the combined number of employees of Tata Steel and Tata Motors (30,000 and 23,000 respectively).

 

Within hours of the Satyam scandal hitting the headlines, its employees had flooded job portals across the world wide web in search of alternate employment. Consider that the Rs 7000-plus crore hole in Satyam’s books is way more than the company’s entire salary bill of Rs 5,040 crore last year. Worse still, it’s running really low on cash, and once-potential suitors have turned wary – they don’t know what lies beneath.

 

As for Satyam’s shareholders, the stock had gone into freefall before they could even make a decent exit. By the end of the day, large-scale selling by foreign institutional investors, among others, had driven the stock down by almost 78% to just a shade below Rs 40 from Tuesday’s close of a little over Rs 179, wiping out Rs 9,376 crore of investor wealth in the space of a day. Compared to its closing price of Rs 225 on December 15, the stock is down more than 82%.

 

more in next post.

 

source: The Economice Times 

The knowledge superpower – 3

India has also autonomous capability to access space through our launch vehicles PSLV and GSLV. On October 22, India entered the exclusive club of countries engaged in planetary exploration with the launch of Chandrayaan-1. Successful accomplishment of this mission signifies capabilities in high technologies, complex system engineering, potential for frontier research and a culture of teamwork and unique management systems.

Our nuclear programme has distinguished itself for its innovative approach to developing power reactors. India has capability to build pressurised heavy water reactors operating in a safe and reliable fashion.

Further, in order to exploit our vast thorium resources, India has adopted an innovative three-phase nuclear fuel cycle including mastering the complex fast breeder technology. Nuclear energy promises to provide significant component of our power demands for future.

Nuclear programme also has significantly contributed for food preservation, nuclear medicine as well as agriculture. The efforts of the Defence Research and Development Organization has resulted in notable capabilities in aeronautics, armaments, electronics, compact vehicles, instrumentation, advanced computer and simulations, special materials, naval systems, life sciences and information systems.

Ref: thetimesofindia

Satyam: Full text of Raju’s letter to the Board-3

 

1) A task force has been formed in the last few days to address the situation arising out of the failed Maytas acquisition attempt. This consists of some of the most accomplished leaders of Satyam: Subu D, T R Anand, Keshab Panda and Virender Aggarwal, representing business functions, and A.S.Murthy, Hari T and Murali V representing support functions. I suggest that Ram Mynampati be made the Chairman of this task force to immediately address some of the operational matters on hand. Ram can also act as an interim CEO reporting to the board.

 

2) Merrill Lynch can be entrusted with the task of quickly exploring some merger opportunities.

 

3) You may have a ‘restatement of accounts’ prepared by auditors in light of the facts that I have placed before you.

 

I have promoted and have been associated with Satyam for well over twenty years now. I have seen it grow from few people to 53,000 people, with 185 Fortune 500 companies as customers and operations in 66 countries. Satyam has an excellent leadership and competency base at all levels. I sincerely apologize to all Satyamites and stakeholders who have made Satyam a special organization, for the current situation. I am confident they will stand by the company in this hour of crisis.

in light of the above, I fervently appeal to the board to hold together to take some important steps. Mt T R Prasad is well placed to mobalize support from the government at this crucial time. With the hope that members of the Task Force and the financila advisor, Merrill Lynch (now Bank of America) will stand by the company at this crucial hour, I am marking copies of this statement to them as well.

 

Under the circumustances, I am tendering my resignation as the chairman of Satyam and shall continue in this position only till such time the current board is expanded. My contribution is just to ensure enhancement of the board over the next several days or as early as possible.

 

I am now prepared to subject myself to the laws of the land and fact the consequences thereof.

 

(B. Ramalinga Raju)

 

Copied marked to:

1) SEBI Chairman

2) Stock Exchanges

 

ref: The Economic Times