Events of the fortnight that you may have missed

Events of the fortnight that you may have missed -

PRINCE AND THE PENSIONER

• The Prince of Wales celebrated his 65th birthday in India, along with his wife Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall. The future king was in the limelight when he took the Queen's place at the summit of the Commonwealth Heads of Government in Sri Lanka. Prince Charles is now entitled to a state pension of 110.15 pounds (a little over Rs 11,000) per week.

CORPORATE

• The cola giants are competing with each other to be part of the India growth story. PepsiCo has just announced plans to double its manufacturing capacity in the country and to invest $5.5 billion (around Rs 34,000 crore) by 2020, according to Chairperson and CEO Indra Nooyi. In June, Coca-Cola has announced plans to invest $5 billion in India by 2020.
• Car sales in India are expected to fall in the current financial year, which ends in March 2014, marking a second straight year of decline, according to industry body SIAM. Passenger car sales fell 3.88 per cent to 163,199 units in October, compared with 169,788 in the same month of 2012. Motorcycle sales in October grew by 18.05 per cent to 1,105,103 units, from 936,122 in the same month of the previous year.
• Indian business optimism has averaged 70 per cent over the past four quarters, well below pre-crisis levels (97 per cent in 2007) and down even from the 2009 figure (83 per cent), according to audit and advisory firm Grant Thornton's International Business Report.
• The Competition Commission of India has approved the Jet Airways-Etihad deal, the first foreign direct investment in an Indian carrier by an overseas airline. The Abu Dhabi-based airline acquired a 24 per cent stake for Rs 2,058 crore in the Indian carrier.
• Tata Motors has indicated that it does not want to give up the leasehold rights to 997 acres of land in Singur, West Bengal. The car maker told the Supreme Court it wants to return to the state for the next phase of expansion.
• The Bombay Stock Exchange will launch currency and interest rate derivatives, including rupee-dollar futures contracts, in December. BSE will become the fourth player in currency derivatives in India, after NSE, MCX Stock Exchange and United Stock Exchange.
• Indians are set to outnumber American Internet users to become the world's second largest online community after China. India is expected to have 213 million Internet users by December, and 243 million by June 2014. India's netizen strength stood at 205 million in October. Rural India has seen a 58 per cent year-on-year growth in active internet users since June 2012.
• US Airways Group Inc and American Airlines will be allowed to merge to become the world's largest airline after they agreed to give low-cost rivals more access to key US airports. The government had opposed the merger on the grounds that it would hinder competition and lead to higher fares.

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ECONOMY

• The Maharashtra government has cleared a major bottleneck to pave the way for the construction of the Navi Mumbai airport, one of the state's most ambitious infrastructure projects. State authorities reached an agreement with farmers on compensation for the land to be acquired for the project. The Navi Mumbai airport is proposed to be developed as a second airport for Mumbai, as the existing Chhatrapati Shivaji Inter-national Airport reaches its optimum level of handling 40 million passengers a year by 2014.
• Punjab and Kerala top the list in prosperity and equality amongst Indian states, while Maharashtra leads in terms of per capita income, says a study by CRISIL. Madhya Pradesh is the least prosperous state. CRISIL has developed the prosperity and equity indices on the basis of ownership of consumer durables in a state, using 2011 Census data.
• The Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority Chairman Yogesh Agarwal, who had another one-and-a-half years left at the helm, made a sudden exit after he was excluded from the selection committee to appoint two whole-time directors of the PFRDA. The body administers the National Pension System for Union and state government employees and the unorganised sector. Total pension funds under the NPS are estimated at over Rs 37,000 crore.

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11.46 MILLION TONNES: E-auction of Goa ore permitted by the Supreme Court. The excavated iron ore is lying idle in the mines in Goa since a mining ban was imposed last year. Before the ban in Karnataka and Goa, India was the world's third largest exporter of iron ore.

55 PER CENT: Share of smartphone sales among all mobile phones sold from July to September, compared to 40 per cent for the whole of 2012, according to an Ericsson report. Mobile subcriptions across the world are expected to reach 9.3 billion by 2019. More than 60 per cent of these will be for smartphones.

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MARKETS

• As Microsoft is set to withdraw support to the popular Windows XP operating system, over 34,000 branches of public sector banks, especially in the rural and semi-urban areas, are at risk, according to a study. The penetration of Windows XP in the banking sector is still high at 40 to 70 per cent.
• State Bank of India, the country's largest lender, has posted a 35 per cent fall in net profit at Rs 2,375 crore for the quarter ended September 30 after higher provisioning for bad debts. This is the bank's first earnings after Arundhati Bhattacharya took over as Chairperson on October 7.

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COMING UP

• The finance ministry wants to sell 10 per cent of the government's stake in Indian Oil Corporation in November to meet its disinvestment target of Rs 40,000 crore. This will pave way for disinvestment of other oil sector PSUs such as Engineers India.
• Air India plans to upgrade the software in all its 10 Boeing 787 Dreamliner jets from December. The process will not ground the planes for long. The 787 has suffered a series of glitches since it was introduced two years ago.

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