Singapore, February 20
State-owned carriers Air-India and Indian may be merged after their initial public offerings are completed, Minister for Civil Aviation Praful Patel said today.

A merger could help raise the competitiveness of the airlines against privately owned carriers, Patel told reporters on the sidelines of an aviation conference in Singapore.

“We are looking into synergising the operations of Air-India and Indian to make them stronger carriers, but we haven’t decided on the structure (of a merged carrier).” A final decision on the merger will be made later this year, the minister said.

Mr Patel said Air-India would delay its planned IPO by at least two months as the final details of the offer are still being negotiated.

“Air India’s IPO has been delayed...we now expect that (both) IPOs would be brought out to investors by May,” Mr Patel said. “We are looking at about 20 per cent to 25 per cent public ownership of the companies.” Financial details are still being worked out between the airlines and their advisers, and Mr Patel said he expects substantial progress to be made in the negotiations in coming weeks.

A-I Chairman V. Thulasidas had previously said the airline would launch its initial public offering by March, the end of the carrier’s financial year.

New Delhi, February 20
Coinciding with the visit of French President Jacques Chirac, the Indian Government today signed a contract with French consortium Airbus Industrie to buy 43 jets for domestic carrier Indian for $2 billion.

The agreement was signed by Mr Kiran Rao, Airbus Vice-President (Marketing and contracts), and Indian Chairman-cum-managing director Vishwapati Trivedi. The pact was signed while Mr Chirac and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh discussed other bilateral issues.

Under the agreement, the first aircraft will be supplied in October or early November and all deliveries will be completed by the middle of 2010, Mr Rao said. Among the planes to be delivered are 19 A-319 jets, four A-320s and 20 A321s.

The airline’s Board had cleared the proposal to buy the aircraft in April, 2002. But it was only in September, 2005, that the Indian Government cleared the purchase.

Now, Indian has a fleet of about 90 aircraft.

New Delhi, February 20
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today took up the issue of L.N. Mittal’s bid for Arcelor with French President Jacques Chirac, expressing the hope that justice would be done with all stakeholders.

Mr Mittal earlier met the Prime Minister in the morning, and is said to have apprised him of the issue. Expressing concerns over his hostile bid, the Governments of Luxembourg and Spain have opposed the euro 18.6 billion (US$22.5 billion) bid.

Denying allegations of racism,Mr Chirac said: “In principle, we have absolutely nothing against a non-European taking over a European company.

Noting that Mr Chirac “explained” the position in detail, the Prime Minister said: “it is my hope that a fair decision, taking into account the interests of all stake-holders, will be taken in this matter.”

Mr Chirac said the bid was “purely financial in nature” and there had been no presentation of any kind of industrial development plan.

Later, addressing the industry captains at the India-France Economic Partnership Meet, jointly organised by FICCI, CII and Assocham, he appreciated the Indian economic reforms over the past 15 years. He offered to bail India out of its energy crisis, while calling upon the country to adhere to the international rules, labour standards and protection of environment.

Supporting India’s civilian nuclear energy programme,Mr Chirac said the production of nuclear power by India was ‘necessary’ for the country’s economic development and to ensure a clean environment.

He, however, refused to dwell on difficulties that came in the way of signing a formal pact on nuclear energy cooperation agreed upon by the two sides during Dr Manmohan Singh’s visit to Paris last year.

“India has become a major player in the service sector and will soon be a manufacturing centre. Now the world needs India to benefit from its growing markets and contribution to the world economy,” he said.

Agreeing with Commerce and Industry Minister Kamal Nath, Mr Chirac said: “the bilateral trade between India and France should be doubled within the next 3-5 years. But we must learn to be respectful to each other, pay attention to labour dignity and environmental issues.”

Earlier, Mr Kamal Nath called for a target of a sustained average foreign direct investment (FDI) of $1 billion annually from France into India and an evenly balanced total trade turnover of 10 billion within three years.

New Delhi, February 20
State-run GAIL (India) Ltd is in talks with a couple of overseas oil and gas exploration companies for a possible acquisition that would add upstream arm to the gas transportation firm.

“We have identified two to three companies for possible acquisition and are commissioning due diligence shortly,” GAIL Chairman and Managing Director P. Banerjee told reporters on sidelines of the 4th Asia Gas Partnership Summit here today.

GAIL, he said, wanted to add an oil and gas exploration arm and was looking at a company with deep expertise in the upstream oil business.

Refusing to divulge details about the companies, he said “the companies have assets in several countries.”

“Typically, we are interested in companies which have presence in West Asia, East Africa and Asia-Pacific,” he said, but did not give any details.

Mr Banerjee said the companies GAIL was talking to were of $500 million to $1 billion size.

GAIL was awaiting political clearance from the government to make a bid for Pakistan’s Sui Southern Gas Co Ltd, which is being privatised, he said.

Pakistan plans to sell a 51 per cent stake in Sui Southern Gas (SSGC) along with management control and has invited expressions of interest by March 4. SSGC is Pakistan’s second-largest gas transmission and distribution company, with a franchise area comprising the provinces of Sindh and Baluchistan.

Mr Banerjee said GAIL plans to invest Rs 2,500-3,000 crore next fiscal in laying pipelines and expanding capacity of its petrochemical plant. — PTI

New Delhi, February 20
India has decided to join the USA-sponsored Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan (TAP) pipeline to import natural gas to meet the fuel needs of its growing economy though the fate of the Iran-India gas pipeline hangs in fire.

After participating in three day meeting for the first time as an “observer” in the 9th meeting of the steering committee of the TAP project, held at Turkmenistan, New Delhi has decided to join the $3.5 billion project.

“We have 90 days to get the necessary official approvals to join the project. Once approved by the Cabinet, the project will be renamed TAPI (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India pipeline),” Petroleum Minister Murli Deora said today.

Speaking on the sidelines of a conference, Mr Deora said he expected to hold detailed discussions with the Prime Minister and the Finance Minister on the Rangarajan committee recommendations pertaining to petroleum product pricing and other tax issues.

A senior official of the Petroleum Ministry a decision was likely to be taken on the pipeline project before US President George Bush’s visit to India.

“The USA-sponsored Asian Development Bank (ADB) has also shown a keen interest in the project, claiming that the 1680- km pipeline can be laid down from the Dauletabad gas fields in Turkmenistan to the northern region of Afghanistan, passing through Pakistan’s Punjab region to enter India through Punjab near Amritsar. A feasibility report conducted by the bank has been submitted to India for consideration,” said the official.

Bangalore, February 20
Tally (India) has just launched the latest version of its highly successfully accounting and inventory management software, Tally 8.1, which comes with what the company calls “concurrent, multilingual capability.” The software enables the user to enter data in one language, and have it “transliterated” into different languages. It currently supports Hindi, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati, Oriya, Bengali, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam, and will soon offer “bi-directional” languages like Urdu.

The company was earlier called Peutronics, and Tally was launched much before the big services boom happened to a nascent Indian information technology industry. Bharat Goenka, the Managing Director, today laughs about the products vs services debate that began in the late 1990s, which was mostly cast in terms of “moving up the value chain.”

“Indian IT is mostly about services, but for that to change, we must realise that getting into IT products is not about moving up the value chain. Products are simply not on the same chain. They are a different thing all together. Today we need new companies who decide to get into products.”

“Language computing is a challenge that has already been solved several times over. And we are not claiming that we are doing translation. The story today is concurrent language computing.” says Goenka. What the software does is effectively transliterate data (render the same word, say tax, in a different script) into the desired language. This would enable businessmen to send invoices, purchase orders, or delivery notes in different languages after entering it in only one.

Piracy is still a problem, and Goenka says that a staggering 93 per cent of the Tally software used today is illegally copied. But he hopes to beat it with increased affordability and availability.

Tally’s revenues last year were $ 50 million and is projected to be $ 60 million next year.

Emerging markets are generally not good destinations for software services, as the company size pyramid is flat, with a large number of small companies and a few big ones. “Only big companies need and can afford IT services. But we are a product company so we target emerging markets.” Africa has already been identified. The addition of even a single language like French will make Tally more attractive in that market.