The past few years have seen many buybacks by companies

Revisiting SEBI Takeover Code

The single-most important regulation in India, governing the acquisition of shares or control in an Indian listed company is the SEBI (Substantial Acquisition of Shares and Takeover) Regulations, 1997, or the Takeover Code. In the backdrop of changing needs of a dynamic Indian economy surging at a growth rate of more than 7 per cent over the last few years, this code has been tested during many a corporate takeover battle in India, observes Girish Vanvari, Executive Director, M&A Tax Head and Member of the Tax Executive Committee, KPMG India, Mumbai.

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Are the Japanese cost management practices such as kaizen, TPM, etc. adopted in China?

China's cost advantage

Predictably, my email to Raef Lawson on December 14 evening gets an ‘Out of Office Auto Reply' and the message reads: ‘I will be out of the country Dec 14 through Dec 21. I will reply to your message when I return. Happy holidays!' In a few hours, I knew, he would be heading to the airport, and Chennai will be a part of his itinerary, when the CII's Cost Congress 2009 will have the benefit of having him as the master speaker. Luckily, for the purpose of this interview, we make the connect through the IMA (Institute of Management Accountants, US) in which Raef is Professor-in-Residence, and Vice-President of Research.

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'The comma appears before secret and after process...'

Taxman reaches for the sky

Sky that hangs above our heads, describes Shakespeare’s King John. “So foul a sky clears not without a storm,” he says, elsewhere in the play. And that could apply to transponders, too, as they get carried by satellites orbiting in space. For starters, the transponder is what facilitates the transmission of a signal (for example, a television signal) from a single point on the earth (the earth station) to a wide area (the footprint) so that it can be accessed and distributed to individual viewers. It amplifies the signal received from an earth station and retransmits it over a wide area, which is referred to as the footprint of the satellite, explains Amod Khare, a Partner in BMR Advisors, leading the Media and Entertainment practice in the firm.

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'There is very little incentive for the localisation of technology'

Measuring healthcare delivery

Getting to speak to the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of General Electric, Jeffrey Immelt, would have been the most ideal thing to do, to learn about GE’s recent decision to integrate all healthcare units with its Wipro joint venture. But he is “on Barack Obama’s speed dial, and a member of several of Obama’s ‘advisory boards,’” whispers a Sarah Palin fan’s blog that shows up in a Google news search. Be that as it may, I decide to touch-base with the President and CEO of GE Healthcare, South Asia, and Managing Director, Wipro GE Healthcare, V. Raja.

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Technology will certainly reduce transaction costs.

We need an Indian model of financial services

It is a crisp morning shortly after dawn, and the trees in Nageswara Rao Park, Mylapore, Chennai, seem to be swaying in tune with the Sunday concert that is on. Shravan is singing Tyagaraja’s ‘Sarasa saama daana’ to the accompaniment of Shyam on the violin and Kaushik on the mridangam. And, standing on the fringes of the circle of music aficionados is T. T. Srinivasaraghavan, MD, Sundaram Finance Ltd, and Chairman, FIDC (Finance Indust ry Development Council).

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When vulnerability is exploited by threat, it creates loss to an organisation

The information security road to biz process maturity

If your recall of 27001 is an old telephone number or a truncated postal code, you perhaps don’t belong to the information security field. For, the number 27001 jumps off from the site http://www.iso27001security.com/ , as part of the ISO27k family of standards, which provide “guidance on designing, implementing and auditing Information Security Management Systems to protect the confidentiality, integrity and availability of the information assets on which we all depend.”

A Wikipedia page informs that ISO/IEC 27001, published in October 2005 by the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), has as its full name ‘Information technology – Security techniques – Information security management systems – Requirements’ though commonly known as ‘ISO 27001.’
This is a business process maturity standard, avers Govind Srinivasan, CEO, Paramount Dataware Pvt. Ltd., Chennai ( http://www.paramountworld.com/ ).

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Women are counted as workers as they are involved in the economic work and contribute to GDP

It costs Rs 6 to reach Re 1 to the poorest

While agricultural technology is scale-neutral, profitability favours those who have the capacity to hold the stocks and sell at high prices, reduce the cost of production and forge market tie-ups, probably in commercial crops. And mainly they contribute to agricultural growth. Thus observes Swarna S. Vepa, author of Bearing the Brunt: Impact of Rural Distress on Women (Sage), and Visiting Professor, Madras School of Economics, Chennai, during a recent lunch-hour interaction in Business Line. She rues that the debt burden of the poor is increasing.

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Areas where objectivity is normally compromised are revenue synergies, costs to capture and headcount-related synergies

7 steps to synergise M&A success

Mergers and acquisitions (M&As) always make big news, though not the demise of most of them. “Let’s face it: M&As don’t always work,” acknowledges Mr Rajesh Sennik, who leads Accenture’s Strategy Practice in India, based in Delhi. Numbers about M&As tell a dismal story. Approximately 60 per cent of all mergers fail to create shareholder value, and less than a third create value that is noticeably higher than the industry average returns, Mr Sennik informs. “But when M&As succeed, they can lay the foundation for a company to be the leader in its sector.”

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