4 Grey Swans THREAT- $2 trillion INVESTMENT

World facing 4 Grey Swans: WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell Published: Saturday, Nov 24, 2012, 9:07 IST | Updated: Saturday, Nov 24, 2012, 17:09 IST  By Ashish K Tiwari & Nupur Anand | Place: Mumbai | Agency: DNA

Sir Martin Sorrell, the CEO of WPP, the marketing communications giant, says global companies are sitting on as much as $2 trillion (Rs11 lakh crore) cash instead of spending because of an overwhelming sense of caution.

As a result, their focus has shifted to the very short-term, quarter-on-quarter, instead of a year or more, he said at an event on 'How the world views India -- opportunities and challenges, 2013 and beyond' organised by the Bombay Chamber of Commerce and Industry on Friday evening.The ad maven predicted 2013 will be a difficult year with not many significant events scheduled. "2014 looks better with big events happening including in Russia and Brazil," he said.According to him, there are four potential Grey Swan events – events that are possible but are considered unlikely, to differentiate them from Black Swan events that are entirely improbable – facing the globe: the euro zone crisis, the Middle East crisis, the repercussions of change of guard in China and America's gargantuan debt burden.While the euro zone is witnessing better growth, increased levels of success and lots of smiling faces, politically, it's a minefield, while the Middle East has become totally unpredictable, he said.In China, the new leadership's strong message on corruption has instilled great confidence, he said. “Within two years, major changes are expected there,” he said.Lastly, with $16 trillion debt, Sorrell doesn't know what is really happening in America.

“The new administration will have to get its act together fast. And they can't keep ignoring the Gorilla in the room. There has been a significant erosion in confidence, and most companies have missed their topline forecasts earlier. The post-October period is looking better, though,” he said.Meantime, Sorrell said India remains better placed than other nations because of easy accessibility, increased growth, success rate and, again, smiling faces.“India is a vital destination, more important than other countries because the access to companies here is significantly easier compared with many other nations. Populous, rapidly growing countries like India will contribute to global growth,” he said.

Sorrell said today India has a series of successful companies and a good number of big names globally are Indian – praising what Tata Motors did with Jaguar Land Rover or what Mahindras, Ambanis, Mittals have done.“However, I find visits to India very disturbing. The abject poverty outside the pristine campuses in Bangalore is unnerving at a mental, psychological and emotional level. In fact, this is the reason why I like going to China more. It is not that there is no poverty in China but just that they have done a better job at concealing it with the investments in infrastructure,” he said.

http://www.dnaindia.com/money/report_world-facing-4-grey-swans-wpp-ceo-sir-martin-sorrell_1768761

India Inc's Leading Ladies... Boardroom Power..

Girl power in the boardroom:

 India Inc's leading ladies

Roshni Nadar, Shiv Nadar's only daughter and a trained classical musician, is the executive director and CEO, HCL Corp. Before becoming CEO, she was the trustee of the Shiv Nadar Foundation.

Shobhana Bhartia is the chairperson and managing director of HT Media Ltd. She is the daughter of industrialist K.K. Birla and is married to Shyam Sunder Bhartia, chairman and managing director of Jubilant Life Sciences Ltd.

Aruna Jayanthi is the chief executive officer of Capgemini India, one of the biggest business units of Capgemini group. Jayanthi initially wanted a career in banking and finance, but joined TCS when the company made her a campus offer.

Preetha Reddy is the managing director of Apollo Hospitals. She joined the company in 1989 and became the managing director five years later.

Ekta Kapoor is the joint managing director of Balaji Telefilms, and is credited for having created two of the most popular soaps on Indian television.

Chanda Kochhar is the CEO and MD of ICICI Bank, India's largest private sector bank. She joined Industrial Credit and Investment Corporation of India Ltd in 1984 as a management trainee, and she took over her current post after K.V. Kamath, who was CEO of the bank since 1996, stepped down in May 2009

Nita Ambani is the chairperson of Reliance Foundation, and is married to Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani. She is a non-executive director on the board of Oberoi Hotels and Resorts.

Kalpana Morparia is the CEO of JPMorgan India. Before joining JPMorgan, Morparia was the joint managing director at ICICI group from 2001 to 2007. She had been with the group since 1975.

Zia Mody is the managing partner, AZB & Partners, the law firm that has advised companies such as Reliance Industries, Vedanta and Bharti Airtel on their biggest deals — BP, Cairn India and Zain, respectively.

Abanti Sankaranarayanan is the deputy managing director and marketing director at Diageo India. Before joining Diageo, she was executive director and deputy chief executive of Tata-owned Mount Everest Mineral Water.

Leena Nair (right) is executive director-human resources at Hindustan Unilever. Nair joined the company after passing out of XLRI and has stayed with it for 19 years. She took over her current role in June 2007.

Meher Pudumjee is the chairperson of Thermax, a position she took over after the retirement of her mother Anu Aga in October 2004. Pudumjee managed the company's subsidiary in the UK before joining the board of directors in 1996.

Schauna (left) and Nadia Chauhan Saluja are the CEO and director, respectively, at Parle Agro.

Vinita Bali is the managing director at Britannia Industries since May 2006. Bali's first job was at Voltas, after which she moved to Cadbury and then to Coca Cola. She joined Britannia as chief executive in January 2005.

Shikha Sharma has been the chief executive officer and managing director at Axis Bank since June 2009. Before joining Axis Bank, Sharma was the head of ICICI Prudential Life Insurance Co. She had started her career with ICICI Ltd in 1980.

Renu Sud Karnad has been the managing director of Housing Development Finance Corp. Ltd since January 2010. She had started her career in the legal and credit department of HDFC.

Anu Aga was the chairperson of Thermax from 1996 to 2004. She started her career in Thermax in 1985 and took charge of the company's human resources function form 1991 to 1996. She was nominated to the Rajya Sabha in April 2012.

Mallika Srinivasan is the chairman of Tractors and Farm Equipment, or TAFE. She has a graduate MBA from the Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania, and an MA in Econometrics from the University of Madras. She is married to Venu Srinivasan, chairman and managing director of TVS Motor.

Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, is the chairperson and managing director of Biocon, a company she started in 1978. She was awarded the Padma Shri (1989) and Padma Bhushan (2005) for her efforts in the field of biotechnology.

Naina Lal Lidwai is the country head of HSBC India, and was one of the first women to enter the investment banking business in the country.

http://www.ndtv.com/photos/business/girl-power-in-the-boardroom-india-inc-s-leading-ladies-14119/slide/20

INDIA's Highly Paid Business Women ...

CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL...

Kavery Kalanithi is India's highest paid business woman

Kavery Kalanithi of Sun TV Group has retained her position as the country's top paid businesswoman, although her pay package declined to Rs 57 crore in 2012, according to Fortune magazine. The pay packet of Kavery Kalanithi, executive director of Sun TV Network and wife of Kalanithi Maran, declined to Rs 57 crore in 2012 from around Rs 72 crore last year.

In the Fortune list of top 10 most-paid businesswomen, Peninsula Land chairperson Urvi A. Piramal bagged the second rank with an annual pay package of Rs 7.3 crore.

Apollo Hospital Enterprises managing director Preetha Reddy came third with an annual pay packet of Rs 6.9 crore.

Vinita Singhania, MD of JK Laksmi Cement, with a pay packet of Rs 5.9 crore, came next.

She was followed by Vinita Bali, MD, Britannia Industries, who took home Rs 5.7 crore.

HDFC managing director Renu Sud Karnad, with a pay package of Rs 5.1 crore, was next. 

She was followed by Suneeta Reddy, joint MD, Apollo Hospitals, who had a package of Rs 5 crore.

ICICI Bank MD and CEO Chanda Kochhar, whose annual pay package is at Rs 4.24 crore, came eighth. Interestingly, Kochhar has been named as the most powerful woman in Indian business for the second consecutive year by Fortune. 

Among others in the highest paid women executives list are Sundram Fasteners joint MD Arathi Krishna (Rs 4 crore) and 

Rupa Gurunath, wholetime Director, India Cements (Rs 3.9 crore).

After Kochhar, TAFE chairperson Mallika Srinivasan comes next in the most powerful women executive category.

Capgemini India CEO Aruna Jayanthi stands third in the power list.

http://www.ndtv.com/photos/business/kavery-kalanithi-is-india-s-highest-paid-business-woman-14182

MphasiS falls - Hewlett-Packard's $8.8 billion writedown

MphasiS stock falls on majority owner Hewlett-Packard's $8.8 billion writedown

Reuters | Updated On: November 21, 2012 11:18 (IST)
Mumbai: Shares in software and back office provider MphasiS fell 2.8 per cent after majority owner Hewlett-Packard took a $8.8 billion writedown after alleging a massive accounting scandal at its British software unit Autonomy.The news sent HP's shares, which owns a 60.5 per cent stake in MphasiS, plunging 12 per cent to a 10-year low.Hewlett-Packard said on Tuesday it took an $8.8 billion charge related to its acquisition of software firm Autonomy, citing "serious accounting improprieties," as it swung to a fourth-quarter loss.

HP said that personal computer sales shrank again and its quarterly revenue fell 6.7 percent. HP's stock dropped 6.6 percent in premarket trading.The Silicon Valley technology company, in the midst of a multiyear turnaround plan, said the charge is linked to the "associated impact of those improprieties, failures and misrepresentations on the expected future financial performance of the Autonomy business over the long-term." HP said the accounting issues happened prior to its acquisition ofAutonomy in 2011 for $11.5 billion. HP had been criticized by analysts for overpaying.

Copyright @ Thomson Reuters 2012 http://profit.ndtv.com/news/market/article-mphasis-stock-falls-on-majority-owner-hewlett-packards-8-8-billion-writedown-313571

TOP-US- LEADERS....FISCAL CLIFF...!!!

REX NUTTING Archives | Email alerts

Nov. 21, 2012, 12:55 p.m. EST 10 people who led us to the ‘fiscal cliff’ Commentary: From Laffer to Obama, they fed our greed and guilt By Rex Nutting, MarketWatch

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — With our political leaders locked in a fiscal struggle that threatens to throw the economy off a so-called cliff and into recession, you might be wondering how we got to this place.

Remember that this supposed fiscal cliff is the direct result of two contradictory impulses in American life: Greed and guilt. Greed for low taxes, a strong military, a strong safety net and lots of government spending for everyone. And guilt that we weren’t paying our way. Read “Stop calling it a ‘fiscal cliff’”

All of us (or almost all) had a role in this melodrama, either benefiting from the spending or from the lower tax rates. Despite our culpability, it took strong national leaders to foster the heady mix of greed and guilt that brought us to this spot.

Here are the 10 people most responsible for bringing us to the edge of the fiscal cliff:

 

Arthur Laffer. Laffer was the economist who proved the existence of the free lunch. His Laffer Curve showed, in theory, that cutting tax rates would actually increase tax revenue. He gave intellectual cover to those conservatives who wanted to cut taxes, but who didn’t want to be seen as contributing to a big deficit. He gave them a guilt-free way to cut revenue.

There’s only one problem: Laffer’s ideas didn’t pan out in practice: Tax cuts don’t pay for themselves. Tax cuts are a major cause of our $16 trillion national debt.

Pete Peterson. If there’s one person who we can blame for making us feel guilty about the federal deficit, it’s Peterson, a hedge-fund billionaire who was a cabinet secretary in the Reagan administration. Peterson founded, funded or supported most of the institutions in Washington devoted to publicizing the problem of the deficit, including the Concord Coalition, the Peterson Foundation, The Fiscal Times, and the anti-deficit documentary “I.O.U.S.A.”

Without Peterson’s billions and the guilt it bought, the deficit would be a fringe issue.

Bill Clinton. President Clinton made budget surpluses look easy. The budget was in the black the last four years of his administration. What’s worse, he made surpluses look like a sure thing.

Clinton’s surpluses were partly the result of Washington going on a serious budget diet, with higher taxes paired with moderation in spending. But it was the booming economy — and higher taxes on capital income — that turned the modest deficits of the early Clinton years into surpluses.

By the time Clinton left office, politicians were beginning to talk about perpetual surpluses, in exactly the same way that hucksters on Wall Street were talking about a perpetual bull market. And with exactly the same outcome.

Alan Greenspan. Greenspan was a high priest of both guilt and greed. He had always warned Congress about the dangers of the deficits, but his biggest failure as Federal Reserve chairman was the day in 2001 he told Congress that the worst thing it could do was pay down the debt because that would destroy the Treasury market and the Fed’s power to control the economy.

That was the day he endorsed the Bush tax cuts. The Maestro’s endorsement gave intellectual cover to the conservatives who wanted to cut taxes, but who didn’t want to feel guilty.

Greenspan also catered to our greedy side as a serial bubble-blower. He inflated the housing bubble in the 2000s by keeping interest rates low and by refusing to regulate the shadow banking system.

George W. Bush . No one is more responsible for racking up our debt than Bush. He campaigned in 2000 promising to cut taxes in order to avoid paying down the national debt. And when the recession of 2001 arrived, he said tax cuts would revive the economy. And when the economy didn’t revive, he cut taxes some more. Tax cuts for all occasions. And it was all guilt-free

Dick Cheney. While Bush was busy cutting taxes, Cheney was busy planning the war on terror. For the first time in our history, we sent our military into battle without raising taxes at home to help pay for it. It added trillions to the debt.

David Lereah. Lereah was the chief economist for the National Association of Realtors and was perhaps the most enthusiastic and public cheerleader for the housing bubble. Even after the bubble began to deflate, Lereah still insisted that real-estate investments would never lose money.

Of course, Lereah didn’t cause the bubble all by himself, but he does embody the greed that engulfed the real estate industry, the Wall Street banks that profited from it, and the homeowners who took on more debt than they could ever hope to repay.

Grover Norquist. As the head of a powerful lobbying and campaign-finance organization, Norquist forced almost every Republican officeholder to sign a pledge to never raise taxes under any circumstance. If anyone declined to sign or dared to violate the pledge, Norquist would back a primary challenger. The threat worked.

The Norquist pledge blocked any possibility of a budget deal between Democrats and Republicans over the past two years. Democrats insisted that any plan to balance the budget must include more revenue as well as spending cuts, but Republicans held solid against any tax increase.

There are signs that Norquist could be losing his hold on the party. Several Republicans won elections this year without signing his pledge, and several incumbents have said they don’t feel bound by the pledge any more.

Barack Obama. Obama may be the perfect representative of our age, because he encapsulates our national schizophrenia over the budget. He honors both the greed and the guilt. He presided over the largest deficits in history, including a large fiscal stimulus, bailouts of the auto industry, and an expansion of the safety net.

But Obama also lectures us about the need for the government to tighten its belt, even during a recession. He wants to raise taxes, if only on a few, and he’s expressed willingness to cut into the great middle-class entitlements. It was Obama’s administration that first suggested the bargain in 2011 that created the fiscal cliff.

John Boehner. The House speaker is trapped in Grover Norquist’s world. He’s a pragmatic legislator who accepts that the government needs more revenue, but his caucus in the House doesn’t agree. In the summer of 2011, Boehner nearly forced the nation to default on its debt because he couldn’t deliver the votes necessary to raise taxes.

In the end, Boehner was forced to punt the problem down the road. Today’s fiscal cliff showdown is the result of Boehner’s inability to lead the House Republicans to a deal.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/10-people-who-led-us-to-the-fiscal-cliff-2012-11-21?pagenumber=5

Digital boom in finance....

Digital boom in finance coming

Published: Friday, Nov 9, 2012, 9:30 IST 
By Nitin Shrivastava & Nupur Anand | Place: Mumbai | Agency: DNA

Growing adoption of internet and mobile platforms by consumers to research and buy products and services online is likely to aid financial institutions to drive their revenues twice as fast in the next few years in India, consultant McKinsey has said.While the overall financial industry revenue pool is likely to grow at around 14% per year from $120-130 billion in 2011 to $400-440 billion by 2020, the revenues acquired through online digital medium are likely to witness compounded annual growth of around 20-30%.

The digital revenues would account for nearly one fifth of the overall incremental growth until 2020, Alok Kshirsagar and Ramnath Balasubramanian of McKinsey & Co said in the report.The digital services revenue pool for financial institutions in India, currently at $8 billion (Rs42,000 crore), is likely to grow eight times to an estimated $60-70 billion by 2020 on the back of rapidly evolving pool of internet-savvy users and easy online access via mobile phones and tablets, they said.India’s internet penetration with significant buying power is seen as a huge opportunity for financial institutions.

India currently has 122 million internet users that hold a disproportionate 35 to 45% of India’s overall household savings pool. 27 million of these are “digital high-value” consumers the most influential segment, who account for nearly a third of the overall household savings pool of all online users.“By 2015, while the internet user base is likely to triple to about 350 million due to cheaper phones and internet access and continued telecom investment in technology infrastructure, the number of high-value consumers, mostly in age group of 20-45 years with annual household income of over Rs6 lakh, is likely to grow by 160% to 70 million,” said Kshirsagar, a senior partner at McKinsey.

He said online consumer behaviour is changing fast and financial institutions will have to respond even faster to tap this segment.“Poor virtual experience, lack of a differentiated product proposition, and customers’ security concerns are some of the factors that deter customers from going ahead with buying process. Recognising and addressing these challenges can help FIs to better serve online customers and capture the digital opportunity. Also they can only create value, lower costs and increase operating profits through innovation and change,” he said.

As per the McKinsey report, at present less than 0.5% of internet users searching for financial services actually progress online through the various stages of research, product selection, purchase and online activation.Deepak Yohannan, CEO of Myinsuranceclub.com, an online insurance aggregator says that at present only 5% of the total visitors who log in end up buying a life insurance policy online. “One impediment is that very few companies have integrated their buying sites with that of aggregator. So even if a person clicks on buy he is redirected to the company website and has to start the process from scratch. And many customers are lost in this process,” he said.

McKinsey also says it may take time for customers to go fully digital, and suggests lack of differentiation is another reason why customers don’t buy products online.But financial institutions counter that providing complicated products may turn away customers.K G Krishnamoorthy Rao, MD & CEO, Future Generali, said the attempt is to provide vanilla products initially so that the consumer is more willing to buy it

http://www.dnaindia.com/money/report_digital-boom-in-finance-coming_1762263

Indian Sanjit Biswas sells firm to Cisco

Indian sells firm to Cisco for Rs6.6,000 crore

Published: Wednesday, Nov 21, 2012, 6:00 IST 

By Beryl Menezes | Place: Mumbai | Agency: DNA

When Sanjit Biswas set up Meraki Networks in 2006 — he was 24 then — creating a billion-dollar company in six years may have stretched even his own formidable imagination. Formidable, because he came to the table with pedigree — a Bachelor of Science from Stanford University and a Masters and a Ph.D from Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT). (Rajeev Motwani, mentor of one Sergei Brin and Larry Page, who went on to set up Google, was Biswas’ mentor, too, at Stanford).

On Monday, Biswas took centrestage when his cloud computing start-up based in San Francisco got bought by Cisco, the networking giant, in a cool all-cash deal of $1.2 billion (Rs6,600 crore).

That would most probably mean moolah well in excess of $100 million (Rs550 crore) for Biswas personally, said local venture capital industry observers. Not a bad return in six years, considering the company was set up with $80 million (Rs440 crore) from investors such as Google, Sequoia Capital and DAG Ventures, the company’s website shows.

For Meraki, which offers wi-fi, switching, security and mobile device management – all centrally managed from the cloud, CEO Biswas was planning an IPO after hitting $100 million revenue run rate.So his off-the-cuff reaction was to turn down Cisco’s offer a couple of weeks back.Later, when the company board weighed matters in the context of poor market valuations in the industry and unsteady investment climate for expansion, it decided to take it -- even as Biswas & Co got to steer Cisco’s Cloud Networking Group.

For Biswas, that’s a long way from where it all started:the eureka moment happened when he was doing a project at MIT on rooftop networks called Roofnet Project with classmate John Bicket (currently chief technology officer of Meraki) along with Hans Robertson (vice-president of product management, Meraki). Biswas was asked by an NGO if this rooftop wi-fi technology could be used to provide internet services to the poor.He took leave of absence from MIT to co-found Meraki, with the intention to provide wireless internet services to the poor as cheap as $10 at a time when routers cost $1,500.Today there are tens of thousands of users of the system across the globe.

By the way, ‘Meraki’ is Greek for ‘doing something with passion and soul’.It shows.

http://www.dnaindia.com/money/report_indian-sells-firm-to-cisco-for-rs6-6000-crore_1767315

HP takes $8.8 bn hit--accounting fraud

HP takes $8.8 bn hit, alleges accounting fraud in Autonomy HP announced “non-cash impairment charge of $8.8 billion related to Autonomy in the fourth quarter of its 2012 fiscal year.NEW YORK, NOV 20:  

In what could be one of the biggest corporate frauds, HP today said it has taken a $8.8 billion ’charge’ on Autonomy, the British software firm it had bought in 2011, as some former executives of the acquired company had wilfully misrepresented accounts.

“HP is extremely disappointed to find that some former members of Autonomy’s management team used accounting improprieties, misrepresentations and disclosure failures to inflate the underlying financial metrics of the company, prior to Autonomy’s acquisition by HP,” the technology giant said in a statement.These efforts appear to have been a “wilful effort” to mislead investors and potential buyers, and severely impacted HP management’s ability to “fairly value” Autonomy at the time of the deal, it added.

The company announced “non-cash impairment charge of $8.8 billion related to Autonomy in the fourth quarter of its 2012 fiscal year.”“The majority of this impairment charge, more than $5 billion is linked to serious accounting improprieties, misrepresentation and disclosure failures discovered by an internal investigation by HP and forensic review into Autonomy’s accounting practices prior to its acquisition,” it added.The balance of the impairment charge is linked to the recent trading value of HP stock and headwinds against anticipated synergies and market place performance.Shares of HP crashed by nearly 12 per cent in early trade after the company revealed the development which was attributed for the net loss in fourth quarter.

For the fourth quarter ended October 31, HP registered a net loss of $6.9 billion compared to a profit of $0.2 billion in the same period last year.HP said it has referred the matter to the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s Enforcement Division and the UK’s Serious Fraud Office for civil and criminal investigation.It had launched an internal investigation into these issues after a senior member of Autonomy’s leadership team came forward, following the departure of Autonomy founder Mike Lynch, it added.

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/companies/hp-takes-88-bn-hit-alleges-accounting-fraud-in-autonomy/article4116374.ece?homepage=true