Mumbai, February 10
Investments by overseas investors in the Indian stock markets since the beginning of 2013 has crossed US $7 billion mark, out of which more than $3 billion were pumped in the month of February alone. Foreign institutional investors infused a net amount of $ .23 billion (about Rs 17,211 crore) during February, taking the total for 2013 so far to $ 7.29 billion (Rs 39,270 crore ) for Indian stocks.

Market analysts attributed strong FII inflows to signs of easing interest rates by the Reserve Bank and the subsequent impact of improved liquidity position.

Additionally, a slew of measures taken by the government, including the postponement of GAAR (General Anti Avoidance Rules)implementation by two years to April 1, 2016 and partial decontrol in diesel prices have also attracted foreign investors.

In February, FIIs were gross buyers of shares worth Rs 34,298 crore, while they sold equities amounting to Rs 17,087 crore, translating into a net investment of Rs 17,211 crore ($ 3.23 billion), as per data available with capital markets regulator Securities & Exchange Board of India.

Foreign fund houses also infused Rs 1,249 crore ($ 234 million) in the debt market in February. This takes the overall net investments by FIIs into debt markets at Rs 4,196 crore ($ 785 million) so far this calendar year.

"FIIs have been betting high on Indian equities since last six-seven months and reform measures taken by the government has further boosted the sentiments," Wellindia Executive Director Hemant Mamtani said.

"Besides, FIIs have been infusing money into the Indian market on account of change in RBI's monetary policy that have added liquidity to the system. This liquidity will help in growth of the country," he added.

FIIs bought equities worth $ 24.4 billion in 2012, about $ 5 billion below record purchases two years ago.

The stock market barometer Sensex has gained 58 points so far this year to end at 19,484.77 points on Friday.

As on Feb 8, the number of registered FIIs in the country stood at 1,761 and total number of subaccounts were 6,333.

Meanwhile, SEBI will auction bonds worth $11.3 billion this month, following the hike in investment caps for FIIs in corporate and government debt markets by $5 billion each.

The auction for allocation of available debt limits after the increase in investment ceilings will be conducted for FIIs on Feb 20 through an electronic bidding process. The move follows a decision by the RBI to enhance the limit for investment by FIIs in the long-term government debt securities by $5 billion to $15 bn and in the corporate non-infrastructure debt category to $5 bn. — PTI

New Delhi, February 10
With the recent hike in diesel prices putting an additional burden of Rs 3,300 crore on Indian Railways, the state-owned behemoth is considering to further increase passenger fares or raise freight charges.

Among various options, Railways is contemplating whether to introduce fuel adjustment component in the fare structure to increase fares in all classes or hike passenger fares by a few paise per km, sources said.

The ministry, which is in the process of finalizing the 2013-14 rail budget to be presented on February 26, is likely to raise catering charges in premier trains like the Rajdhani, Duronto and Shatabdi, which will be part of the fare.

Indian Railways is already reeling under deficit of Rs 25,000 crore in the passenger segment. It has hiked passenger fares by 21% from Dec 22, aiming to mop up Rs 6,600 crore in a year, but the diesel price hike of Rs 10.8 a litre has put additional burden of Rs 3,300 crore annually.

Railway Minister Pawan Kumar Bansal did not rule out another hike when he was asked about it a few days ago. "We have to form our view on this (increasing rail fare) within next few days. We are working on it," Bansal had said. — PTI

Looking to grab a bigger slice of India’s camera and image equipment pie, Canon India has in the recent months intensified its marketing plans. As part of the strategy, it recently launched a first-of-its kind “out-of-home’ initiative in India. Canon India president & CEO Kazutada Kobayashi talks to Girja Shankar Kaura about the initiative and other plans that Canon has for India.

Q: Can you share Canon’s journey in India — how you started and where you are looking to go from here?

Canon India has completed 15 years of its operations in India last year. So we are quite a young company in India. But in a very short time we have grown quite rapidly. We started with 150 employees and now it’s 1,000. We also achieved a turnover of Rs 1,850 crore last year and are looking forward to a growth of about 26 per cent this year, that is, Rs 2,350 crore. Growth is of course one very important issue in such an emerging market and in our industry it’s not an exception. On the other hand, this year we particularly wanted to see the balance of quality and we also wanted to produce good profits in this operation. Last year, many companies have been affected by the sudden depreciation of the Indian rupee which didn’t give enough time to adjust. So now, if it stays between Rs 53-55, I think we have a huge scope for growth.

Q: What is your market share in India?

It depends on the domain or the category of business. To start with cameras, in DSLR cameras we have a 50 per cent share in the market making us a leader in this segment and we intend to maintain the same. Moving to the compact camera category, which is the point and shoot camera, we have a 23% market share and want to enhance it to 26% this year.

In the copier business, we have 25% market share. We are the number one in this category and hope to maintain the number one position. Printers are one area where we want to push, particularly inkjet printers. Last year we improved our market share pretty much and reached to 26 % but we’re looking for a 30% share in the inkjet printer market this year. So that is particularly one area we want to grow in.

Q: How do you see India as a market from Canon’s point of view?

India is one of the fastest growing markets in the world considering the consumer point of view. The mid-income range of households in India is expected to rise to as many as 44 million by 2015, which is a huge number. This shows that there is a huge untapped market which has potential to be tapped. But the penetration ratio for cameras is still very low, like 4 to 5 per cent. We’re looking for this demand to be created in a short while and want to be one of the major players.

Q: What will be Canon’s major highlights in 2013?

Based on our 15 year experience, we wish to serve more and more customer delight to the Indian people. Our aim is to enhance customer service in the coming year. One of the initiatives we took and announced today is the establishment of Canon neon signage at international airports in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. We want to expand the power of our services, so after selling the product we want to keep our customers happy and hence, we want to enhance the number of service persons by at least 15 per cent compared to last year so that we can cater the users of our products.

Q: Tell us something about the neon sign launch today and how much investment has Canon made in this?

Depending on the location, the cost varies. We have invested Rs 70 lakh in the establishment of these three neon signs at Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore international airports. For the next year, we plan to expand this number and establish neon signs in Chennai, Kolkata and other major cities.

Q: What advantages you see for Canon by such marketing initiatives?

This is not a product advantage or product advertisement. This is a corporate commitment signage. We wanted to show our attitude in the local area that Canon is not going away and we will keep serving our products until the end of the life. These neon signs are intended to enhance the corporate image of our company.

Q: How do you see Canon in competition with Sony and Nikon, especially in the camera market?

I must say we are probably the only total solution providers. We have solutions for the input of image, that is, camera and even the output of the image, that is, printer. In that conjunction, we can cover the whole process of image management under the same brand.

We are well known in the industry for our 100 per cent inhouse production. Key devices like lenses, image sensor, and image processor all are produced inhouse. We don’t rely on any manufacturer in Taiwan, Korea or China. All camera products are manufactured in our factories in Japan, China and Malaysia. Vietnam for printers, Thailand for copiers and printers. We also have factories in South Korea.

New Delhi, February 10
The country’s total wireless phone subscriber base has continued to decrease as the mobile phone operators kept up with disconnecting inactive SIM cards in the month of December.

Figures released by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) for the month of December point out that India’s total telecom subscriber base declined by 25.97 million to 895.51 million in the month. There were 921.47 million telecom subscribers in the country in the month of November.

In a statement TRAI said the total wireless subscriber base decreased from 890.60 million in November 2012 to 864.72 million at the end of December 2012.

“This decline is majorly due to large scale disconnections of inactive SIMs by some of the service providers,” TRAI said.

As a result of the operators disconnecting the inactive users, the overall teledensity in the country decreased to 73.34 per cent at the end of December, 2012 from 75.55 per cent in the previous month.

All operators lost subscribers in December, barring Unitech, HFCL and Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL). Reliance Communications was the biggest loser with the loss of 15.58 million subscribers which took its user base to 118.52 million at the end of December.

It was followed by Vodafone, which lost 3.28 million users. Tata Teleservices lost 2.95 million subscribers (now at 69.55 million), Aircel 1.97 million (63.34 million) and Bharti Airtel 1.7 million (181.90 million).

TRAI figures said that Idea Cellular lost 197,231 users and CDMA player Sistema Shyam lost 789,420 users.

Against the prevailing trend State-run BSNL added 13,013 users, taking its subscriber base to 99.92 million. On the other hand the other State-run telecom operator Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd (MTNL) lost 2,975 users with its user base now at 5.3 million.

The requests for mobile number portability (MNP) continued to rise. By the end of December 2012, about 80.06 million subscribers had submitted their requests for porting their mobile numbers. Rajasthan continued to lead in the MNP with 7.59 million requests followed Gujarat at 6.94 million subscribers looking to port to another telecom operator.

San Francisco/Seoul, February 10
It was the late Steve Jobs' worst nightmare. A powerful Asian manufacturer, Samsung Electronics Co Ltd , uses Google Inc's Android software to create smartphones and tablets that closely resemble the iPhone and the iPad. Samsung starts gaining market share, hurting Apple Inc's margins and stock price and threatening its reign as the king of cool in consumer electronics.

Jobs, of course, had an answer to all this: a "thermonuclear" legal war that would keep clones off the market. Yet nearly two years after Apple first filed a patent-infringement lawsuit against Samsung, and six months after it won a huge legal victory over its South Korean rival, Apple's chances of blocking the sale of Samsung products are growing dimmer by the day.

Indeed, a series of recent court rulings suggests that the smartphone patent wars are now grinding toward a stalemate, with Apple unable to show that its sales have been seriously damaged when rivals, notably Samsung, imitated its products.

That, in turn, may usher in a new phase in the complex relationship between the two dominant companies in the growing mobile computing business.

Tim Cook, Jobs' successor as Apple chief executive, was opposed to suing Samsung in the first place, according to people with knowledge of the matter, largely because of that company's critical role as a supplier of components for the iPhone and the iPad. Apple bought some US $8 billion worth of parts from Samsung last year, analysts estimate.

Samsung, meanwhile, has benefited immensely from the market insight it gained from the Apple relationship, and from producing smartphones and tablets that closely resemble Apple's.

While the two companies compete fiercely in the high-end smartphone business — where together they control half the sales and virtually all of the profits - their strengths and weaknesses are in many ways complementary. Apple's operations chief, Jeff Williams, told Reuters last month that Samsung was an important partner and they had a strong relationship on the supply side, but declined to elaborate.

As their legal war winds down, it is increasingly clear that Apple and Samsung have plenty of common interests as they work to beat back other potential challengers, such as BlackBerry or Microsoft. The contrast with other historic tech industry rivalries is stark. When Apple accused Microsoft in the 1980s of ripping off the Macintosh to create the Windows operating system, Apple's very existence was at stake. Apple lost, the Mac became a niche product, and the company came close to extinction before Jobs returned to Apple in late 1996 and saved it with the iPod and the iPhone. Jobs died in October 2011.

Similarly, the Internet browser wars of the late 1990s that pitted Microsoft against Netscape ended with Netscape being sold for scrap and its flagship product abandoned.

Apple and Samsung, on the other hand, are not engaged in a corporate death match so much as a multi-layered rivalry that is by turns both friendly and hard-edged. For competitors like Nokia, BlackBerry, Sony, HTC and even Google — whose Motorola unit is expected to launch new smartphones later this year — they are a formidable duo.

THE WAY THEY WERE: The partnership piece of the Apple-Samsung relationship dates to 2005, when the Cupertino, California-based giant was looking for a stable supplier of flash memory. Apple had decided to jettison the hard disc drive in creating the iPod shuffle, iPod nano and then-upcoming iPhone, and it needed huge volumes of flash memory chips to provide storage for the devices.

The memory market in 2005 was extremely unstable, and Apple wanted to lock in a supplier that was rock-solid financially, people familiar with the relationship said. Samsung held about 50 per cent of the NAND flash memory market at that time.

"Whoever controls flash is going to control this space in consumer electronics," Jobs said at the time, according to a source familiar with the discussions. — Reuters

Chicago, Ill., February 10
Boeing Co completed what it called an uneventful flight on Saturday of a test 787 Dreamliner, its first since the airplanes were grounded more than three weeks ago after a series of battery-related problems. The test flight to gather detailed information on the airplane's lithium-ion batteries lasted two hours and 19 minutes, taking off from and returning to Boeing Field in Seattle, Boeing said.

"The crew reports that the flight was uneventful," Boeing said in a statement.

The 50 Dreamliners in commercial service were grounded worldwide on January 16 after a series of battery-related incidents including a fire on board a parked 787 at Boston's Logan International Airport and an in-flight problem on another airplane in Japan. The groundings have cost airlines tens of millions of dollars, with no solution yet in sight.

The US Federal Aviation Administration said on Thursday it would allow 787 test flights, under more stringent rules, to monitor the batteries in flight.

Boeing said the information gathered during the flight was part of the investigations into the battery events that occurred in January and that additional details could not be shared. The airplane is Boeing's fifth 787 flight test airplane, marked as ZA005, and the only member of the test fleet in service. The flight had a crew of 13, including pilots and testing personnel, Boeing said.

Boeing said no flights of the airplane were planned on Sunday, but it planned to resume flights early in the coming week. Boeing does not provide advance flight schedules.

The test flight departed Boeing Field at 12:32 pm Pacific time and landed at 2:51 pm PST, the company said.— Reuters

The first policy bought by individuals is usually a compulsive tax savings tool or is a result of word of mouth information from close relatives or friends. Seldom is a thought given to serious financial planning, factoring in inflationary pressures or life cycle changes. Given the lack of awareness, this not only falls true in most cases for first time buyers, but also turns out to be a general trend among the regular customers.

An option gives you the right to buy or sell the underlying asset . A call option gives you right to buy the underlying asset while a put option gives you the right to sell. An option contract specifies the strike price, that is, the price at which you can buy or sell the underlying asset. In Futures, you buy a contract which will have a specific lot size of shares. When you buy a Futures contract, you don’t pay the entire value of the contract but just the margin. Open interest is the the total number of contracts not closed or delivered on a particular day.