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Saturday, May 4, 2002,
Chandigarh, India  
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M.S.
Oberoi: zeal for life never flagged ICICI Bank
net profit zooms 60 pc GlaxoSmithKline
sets up Horlicks plant Proposals
worth 580 cr cleared
Hindalco
net profit surges 26.5 pc
‘VoGram’
to connect rural masses |
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Alto
with power steering at Rs 3.19 lakh
Ernst
& Young buys Andersen First Remit ties up with Union Bank Rajesh Menon is CII Director Daewoo to get spares, services
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M.S. Oberoi: zeal for life never flagged New Delhi, May 3 Born on August 15, 1898 in a remote village of erstwhile undivided Punjab, M.S. Oberoi’s life exemplified an inspirational success story of self-styled man. He was only six months old when his father died. He completed his primary education in Rawalpindi, and moved on to Lahore where he obtained his Bachelor’s degree. Shortly thereafter, Oberoi went to seek his fortune in Shimla. Arriving penniless, he found a job as a front desk clerk, at The Cecil Hotel, a hotel he bought over eventually. In 1934, Mr Oberoi acquired his first property - The Clarkes Hotel - by mortgaging his wife’s jewellery and his other assets. Four years later he signed a lease to takeover operations of the 500-room Grand Hotel in Kolkata which was up for sale following a cholera epidemic. In 1943 Mr Oberoi, in grand sweep acquired the controlling interest in the Associated Hotels in India (AHI) which owned the Cecil and Corstophas in Shimla, the Maidens and the Imperial in Delhi and a hotel each in Lahore, Muree, Rawalpindi and Peshawar, thereby becoming the first Indian to run a chain of hotels. “The hotel industry must change to keep pace with the needs of the next millennium,” said the father of the Indian hotel industry, Oberoi had told The Tribune on his 101st birthday. “I have no regrets. I am
satisfied with my life,” were his words then. The Oberoi Intercontinental in Mumbai was established in 1965.Later, he established the Oberoi Maidens and then the Oberoi in the Capital. He set up his first international venture in Nepal and Soaltee Oberoi carved a niche in that
country. The international venture which started from the neighbouring Himalayan kingdom has spread to other parts of the globe. The Oberoi chain today has business tie-ups in a number of countries including
Egypt, Australia and Singapore. By hiring the properties of kings, the first palace hotel was established by the Oberois in Srinagar. The concept has caught the imagination of other hotel chains too, that they have also followed suit. Mr Oberoi was bestowed with the title of Rai Bahadur by the British in 1943 in recognition of his contributions to the hotel industry. He was conferred with the Padma Bhushan by the Indian Government. He was admitted to the Hall of Fame by the American Society of Travel Agents. Man of the World by the International Hotel Association, New York, Honorary Doctorate of Business Administration by the International Management Centre, Buckingham, the UK, and named by Newsweek as one of the “Elite Winners of 1978”.
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ICICI Bank net profit zooms 60 pc
Mumbai, May 3 The total income of the bank was higher at Rs 2,726.59 crore in the reporting year as against Rs 1,462.47 crore in the last fiscal, ICICI Bank Managing Director K.V. Kamath told newspersons after the first Board meeting of merged entity here today. Interest earned in FY-02 stood at Rs 2,151.93 crore (Rs 1,242.13 crore in FY-01), he said. As the reverse merger of the ICICI and its two subsidiaries with the bank has come into effect only on March 30, ICICI Bank’s profit includes only two days profit of the FI and subsidiaries, amounting to about Rs 8 crore. The profit of FY 2002 is therefore largely comparable to FY 2001. During the fourth quarter, the bank’s net profit was 56.88 crore (Rs 50.40 crore) while total income stood at Rs 677.34 crore (Rs 369.13 crore), he said. The profit for Q4 has been affected due to higher deposit mobilisation and substantial addition to the statutory liquidity ratio (SLR) portfolio to meet reserve requirements of the merged entity, Kamath said. In view of the substantial interim dividend of Rs 2 per share declared in January 2002, the Board has decided not to recommend any further dividend for the year.
PTI
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GlaxoSmithKline sets up Horlicks plant
Sonepat, May 3 Mr J.P. Garnier, the company’s global CEO, inaugurated the plant at Sonepat, a satellite town of the Indian Capital. With a workforce of nearly 250, the factory has the capacity to produce 26,100 tonnes of Horlicks annually. It also has modern spray drying technology. The automated design of the factory, spread over 140 acres of land, allows the final product to be completely untouched by human hands. Horlicks is a widely regarded 130-year-old brand. Mr Garnier also announced that GlaxoSmithKline would distribute free medicines to stop the spread of elephantiasis that affects 40 million people in India. British High Commissioner Rob Young, who was the chief guest at the function, said: “I am often criticised by the Indian Government for not encouraging investments by British multinational companies in India. But I think we are doing fairly well. Presently, there is a two-way trade of 5 billion pounds between the two countries and that is going to be steady.” The new plant in Sonepat has an advanced effluent treatment plant and an incinerator for solid waste disposal.
IANS
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Proposals worth 580 cr cleared
New Delhi, May 3 Murasoli Maran gave a green signal to Caltex Oil Corporation for increasing foreign equity from 51 per cent to 100 per cent in the Caltex Oil Corporation. The company is engaged in the import, storage, distribution, bottling and sale of liquefied petroleum gas. Franklin Templeton Holding Ltd will bring in a fresh investment of Rs 290 crore in its asset management company, Templeton Asset Management (India), by issue of optionally convertible preference shares. Other proposals cleared relate to chemicals and petro-chemicals, non-banking finance company activities, automobiles, bottling and sale of LPG, paints, hotels and tourism, textiles, ports and software development. Springer-Verlag GmbH & Co of Germany has been allowed to pick up 95 per cent FDI in Gurgaon-based Bharats Raut & Co, which publishes and reprints scientific, technical, medical and other non-fiction books, articles and journals in electronic or printed form. The inflow involved is Rs 2.56 crore.
UNI
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Hindalco net profit surges 26.5 pc
Mumbai, May 3 The Board has recommended a dividend of Rs 13.5 per equity, which would be in line with the applicable regulations. The total outgo would be Rs 100.52 crore, a company official said. Net sales during this period had risen by 2.46 per cent at Rs 2,331.4 crore compared to Rs 2,275.4 crore the previous fiscal, he said the other income rose sharply by 60.38 per cent at Rs 210.9 crore (Rs 131.5 crore) During the fourth quarter, the net profit rose by 26.5 per cent to Rs 192.2 crore (Rs 152.1 crore) while net sales spurted to Rs 647.7 crore (Rs 598.3 crore).
Century Textiles Century Textile Industries Ltd’s net profit has declined by 78.27 per cent to Rs 11.72 crore in the financial year ended March 31 as compared to Rs 53.95 crore in the previous year. The Board of Directors has recommended 15 per cent dividend on Rs 10 per share as against 10 per cent in the previous year, CTIL said here today. The total income has increased from Rs 2,267.1 crore in FY-01 to Rs 2,285.4 crore in FY-02.
Colgate Palmolive Colgate Palmolive India today declared a second interim dividend of 17.5 per cent at Rs 1.75 per equity share of Rs 10 each for the financial year 2001-02. The decision was taken by the company’s Board here and interim dividend would be paid on equity share capital of Rs 135.99 crore involving a total payout of Rs 23.8 crore, the company said
here.
Maha Seamless Maharashtra Seamless has reported 44 per cent increase in its net profit for the year ended March 31, 2001. The company’s net profit zoomed to Rs 46 crore during last fiscal as compared to Rs 32 crore, recorded during 2000-01. Profit before tax shot up by 70 per cent at Rs 68 crore as compared to the Rs 40 crore in the last fiscal.
Agencies
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‘VoGram’ to connect rural masses
Bangalore, May 3 Scientists at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) have sold the license for the application to a private company that would enable the emotion of voice to be conveyed in a telegram. “VoGram” would improve connectivity in rural India, where some 85,000 post offices without a telephone connection cater to the needs of the people. “We still have a long way to go before the costly cellular services and telephone penetration reaches the masses. Until then, people could benefit from this application, the licence for which has been given to ILI technologies,” Mr K.V.S. Hari of IISc’s electrical and communication engineering department said. India has 1,15,000 post offices, the largest in the world, but only 25,000 have a telephone connections, making telegrams take that much longer to reach the recipient. “The application, if accepted by the postal department, would shorten the time significantly,” says Mr Sira G. Rao, Chairman of ILI technologies, a 15-month-old company in India’s tech capital. “This is not a path-breaking technology. It’s only an application that we developed after 18 months of work. Instead of the curt, sometimes cold, messages conveyed through a telegram, voice would convey the emotion in multiple languages,” adds Mr Hari. The application is a marriage of speech compression, Internet and store and forward messaging ideas. All a person needs to do is to call up the VoGram call centre and record a voice message using a simple card that compresses the voice message. The compressed file is sent through the Internet to the post-office close to the recipients’ address. The post-office could either take out the print out and deliver the message to the recipient or the receiver could call up a local number free of charge, use an access code given by the postman and hear the VoGram. Or, better still, if the postman has a Simputer (developed by IISc professors with Encore Software) play the voice message to the recipient at home. “The postal department has responded favourably to our proposal. This is a niche market where accessibility is a problem. But it is difficult for us to put a figure on the market potential for this,” says Mr Rao. ILI technologies has tied up with the state-owned Indian Telephone Industries (ITI) to market the product. “The revenue generating potential is tremendous,” adds Mr Hari. The institute’s society of innovation and development and ILI technologies have signed a memorandum of understanding to work on add-ons. “The way it works is that we give the licence to ILI and, in turn, they pay us royalty which goes directly to the department,” adds Mr S. Mohan, chief executive of the society.
IANS
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Cyber cafe for the visually impaired
Mumbai, May 3 The cafe was opened jointly by the National Association for the Blind (NAB) and Microsoft India on the NAB premises here yesterday. The specialised cafe enables the user to interact with the computer on voice mode and access information from the websites. “The system employs JAWS software to surf the Net and it is linked to Windows XP and Microsoft Office. When a person logs on to the Net, the system articulates the options available and also the command he has chosen so that he can always correct the command given,’’ Mr Rajiv Nair, President, Microsoft Corporation India explained to UNI after the launch. Besides, when a particular text is copied in Windows from any website, the system articulates it for the user. He has the option to get it printed in the Braille format from a specialised printer, he added. The basic training for using the computers is being provided by NAB through specially trained teachers. NAB also has comprehensive training programmes on mobility and Braille apart from other psychological rehabilitation programmes for the visually challenged. “NAB is currently engaged in a major initiative to integrate the visually impaired with the mainstream. We are planning to set up state resource centres in various parts of the country with state assistance for this purpose,’’ NAB Executive Director C.M. Jaywant said. NAB has already identified Latur, Chandrapur and Nashik for these centres in the initial phase. With the involvement of the government, the initiative will receive all support from local authorities, including District Collectors and Block Development Officers, he added.
UNI
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Alto with power steering at
Rs 3.19 lakh
New Delhi, May 3 The 800cc car Alto LXi comes fitted with Maruti’s electronic power steering, besides features of the existing Alto LX model, and has been aggressively priced at Rs 3.19 lakh (ex-showroom Delhi), a company release said. The pricing of the new car is being seen as a move by the company to play the price card in the competitive premium small car market. At present, the minimum price for a car with power steering is about Rs 3.4 lakh (ex-showroom Delhi). “The Alto LXi now brings power steering within the reach of first-time car buyers and existing owners of Maruti 800,” he added.
PTI
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bb
Protest day LML sales drop CNBC in pact Tata Chem unit Max India Spice Com AirTel scheme |
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New Delhi, May 3
