Business
Govt agency ties up with Amazon for products by grassroot innovators
Products by grassroots innovators, outstanding traditional knowledge holders, as well as student creativity-based innovative products will be available to millions of customers by virtue of a new partnership between NIFientreC and Amazon India launched on Wednesday.
An MoU was signed between NIF Incubation and Entrepreneurship Council (NIFientreC), a Technology Business Incubator (TBI) hosted by the National Innovation Foundation (NIF), an autonomous institute of the Department of Science and Technology, and Amazon India for online distribution of such ready to market products.
NIFientreC was established in 2015 with the financial support from the Department for incubation and commercialisation of technological ideas and innovations of innovators, traditional knowledge holders and students across the country.
This MoU between Amazon, and NIFientreC, follows just a couple of days after the declaration of January 16 as the National Start-up Day by the Prime Minister.
The MoU, signed by Executive Director, NIFientreC, Rakesh Maheshwari and Director, Amazon Seller Services Private Ltd (ASSPL), Sumit Sahay, will help strengthening the commercial dissemination of the innovative products from local startups and boost India’s startup culture in line with these announcements, a release from the Ministry of Science and Technology said.
Chairperson, NIFientreC, Dr Gulshan Rai said: “With the fast-paced digital transformation that’s happening in the country right now, there could not be a better time for grassroots entrepreneurs to consider taking their innovations directly to the consumers all over India.”
Vice President, Amazon India, Manish Tiwary said the partnership with the NIFientreC is aimed at bringing the benefits of digitisation and ecommerce to grassroot entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs and taking forward the student innovations from rural areas to sell to millions of Amazon customers in India and across the globe.
“It is a milestone in India’s innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem, and grassroots innovators will be brought closer to the consumer than ever before. This is an inclusivity paradigm that the rest of the world may want to replicate,” said Director, NIF, Dr Vipin Kumar.
The MoU will accelerate the grassroots innovation delivery to the common people of the country, boosting the local economy and creating livelihoods. It will empower innovators from the deepest pockets of the country to leverage the benefits of inclusive e-commerce.
Business
Indian telecom industry’s revenue doubled in 5 years, Bharti Airtel biggest gainer
New Delhi, Dec 25: The revenue of India’s telecom industry increased 8 per cent (quarter-on-quarter) to Rs 674 billion (13 per cent growth year-on-year) in the second quarter of FY25, mainly driven by tariff hikes, according to a new report.
Driven by three rounds of smartphone tariff hikes, India’s quarterly telecom revenue has almost doubled (up 96 per cent) since September 2019, implying 14 per cent five-year industry revenue CAGR, according to the report by Motilal Oswal Financial Services Ltd.
Given the consolidated market structure in the Indian telecom industry, higher data consumption, lower ARPU, and inadequate returns generated by telcos, “we expect tariff hikes to be more frequent. We build in 15 per cent tariff hike in December 2025.”
The telecom industry’s average revenue per unit (ARPU) has almost doubled from Rs 98 in September 2019 to Rs 193 in September 2024, driven by tariff hikes.
However, as a result of sharp tariff hikes, the industry’s subscriber base at 1.15 trillion in September 2024 is lower than September 2019 levels (1.17 trillion).
Among telcos, Bharti Airtel has been the biggest beneficiary of tariff hikes with a 2.2 times increase in implied ARPU, registering a 17 per cent five-year CAGR.
“We believe the significant improvement in the data subs proportion has also been a key driver for Bharti’s industry-leading ARPU,” said the report.
Over the reporting period from 2019-2024, Bharti’s revenue has increased 2.6 times, implying 21 per cent five-year revenue CAGR, with incremental revenue market share significantly higher at 48 per cent.
“With Vi’s (Vodafone Idea) large capex plans, we believe the pace of market share gains may slow down. However, RJio and Bharti are still likely to continue gaining market share at Vi’s expense, in our view,” the report noted.
Business
AI to generate new revenue streams in 2025, innovate business processes: Experts
New Delhi, Dec 25: Enterprises will reimagine business processes and value streams with AI agents in 2025, while taking into consideration the practical and ethical challenges, industry experts have said, adding that it will be the year of small language models, scaled reasoning and business value realisation.
In the coming year, AI agents will generate new revenue streams, innovate business processes across industries, boosting profitability, operational efficiency, and customer experience.
“Humans will increasingly take on roles where they set up agentic teams, plan agentic workflows, and validate work done by AI Agents,” said Sandhya Arun, Chief Technology Officer, Wipro.
According to Mohammed Rafee Tarafdar, CTO of Infosys, in 2025, we will see a lot of AI initiatives that are currently under rollout, to be scaled across enterprises, and businesses will start realising some measurable business value along the lines of cost, growth, better experience, and risk protection.
“We are seeing increased investments in scaling inferencing which improves the reasoning capabilities, thereby enabling the agentic systems to be used to eliminate tasks and re-engineer the processes,” Tarafdar mentioned.
As the small language models become more specialised and can deliver higher accuracy at lower cost, the adoption of these models in enterprises is likely to accelerate.
Prativa Mohapatra, Vice President and Managing Director, Adobe India, said that fuelled by a healthy enterprise business, vibrant creator community, and upcoming technological advancements, 2025 represents a year of extraordinary opportunity.
“We are committed to leading the way in harnessing generative AI’s potential responsibly and empower businesses and creators alike, setting new benchmarks in personalised customer experiences and content creation while upholding trust and transparency through our content authenticity programmes,” she noted.
The idea of software-defined capabilities, which originated with cloud technology, has now evolved across various machines like vehicles and robots.
“In 2025, software defined machines will be powered by AI and ML and make informed decisions. We will witness an increase in autonomous machines with over-the-air (OTA) updates,” added Arun.
Autonomous industrial robots will proliferate, and software-defined medical devices will evolve towards autonomous preventive maintenance and self-healing with minimal human intervention and down time.
Augmented analytics will enable citizen users to gain access to intelligent insights from ready-to-use data visualisations for faster and informed decision making. Data marketplaces will grow across industries and industry ecosystems to unlock new revenue streams, said experts.
Business
Indian firms raise bumper funds from equity market in 2024, set new records
Mumbai, Dec 24: The year 2024 has been a historic one for the Indian stock market. Corporates raised bumper funds from investors through initial public offerings (IPOs), follow-on public offers (FPOs), qualified institutional placements (QIPs) and rights issues, and set several new records.
In 2024, domestic companies raised Rs 1.64 lakh crore through 90 IPOs.
During this period, shares worth Rs 1.39 lakh crore were sold to institutional investors. This is the highest figure ever for raising capital through public issues.
In 2021, companies raised the highest amount of Rs 1.18 lakh crore through IPOs. During this period, shares worth Rs 41,997 crore were sold by the companies to institutional investors.
So far this year, 20 companies have raised about Rs 18,000 crore through rights issues. Last year this figure was Rs 7,266 crore, and in 2022, it was Rs 3,884 crore.
Due to the boom in the IPO market, in December 2024, about 15 companies are going to raise Rs 25,500 crore through public issues.
The biggest-ever IPO of the Indian stock market was launched by Hyundai Motor India. Its issue size was Rs 27,870 crore.
Earlier, LIC’s public issue of Rs 21,008 crore in 2022 was the biggest IPO in the country so far. In 2024, Vibhor Steel Tube’s IPO received the highest subscription of 320 times. Apart from this, IPOs like KRN Heat Exchanger & Refrigeration, Manba Finance, and Gala Precision Engineering got more than 200 times subscriptions.
Indian firms raised Rs 1.4 lakh crore this year through QIPs, the highest figure so far since 2020.
This year, Vedanta and Zomato have each raised Rs 8,500 crore through QIP. Apart from this, Adani Energy Solutions and Varun Beverage raised Rs 8,373 crore and Rs 7,500 crore, respectively. According to data from the National Securities Depository Ltd (NSDL), foreign investors invested around $14 billion in the primary markets this year, which is more than the previous record of 2021.
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