By Saritha Rai India’s online retail industry has been in turmoil since the government implemented stringent new rules to rein in major players like Amazon and Walmart’s Flipkart. Amid the uproar, Vijay Shekhar Sharma — whose two-year-old Paytm Mall is backed by Alibaba Group — is quietly devising ways to outstrip his rivals. The new […]
Paytm parent pledges all assets to borrow from ICICI Bank
One97 Communications, which owns digital payments major Paytm, has pledged all it current assets and mutual fund investments to ICICI Bank in order to be able to borrow up to Rs 1,400 crore for working capital, according to documents filed with the Registrar of Companies. Working capital is needed for every corporate entity to function, […]
China ride-hailing giant Didi to lay off 15% employees this year: Source
Didi Chuxing will lay off 15% of its staff or about 2,000 people this year, a source said, marking the ride-hailing firm’s first major cut back as it grapples with regulatory scrutiny and public backlash over the murder of two of its users. Didi CEO Cheng Wei said at a meeting with management that the […]
India biggest APAC market, outpacing China in growth: Booking.com
India is the biggest market for travel portalBooking.com in Asia Pacific and is outpacing China in supply growth, a trend the company expects to continue this year as well, a top executive said. “We enjoyed healthy double digits growth in India in 2018 and we expect the same this year as well. We have grown […]
AWS launches five new bare metal instances to give customers greater cloud control
AWS has unveiled five new EC2 bare metal instances to run high-intensity workloads, such as performance analysis, specialised applications and legacy workloads not supported in virtual environments. The new instances – m5.metal, m5d.metal, r5.metal, r5d.metal, and z1d.metal – have all been designed to run virtualisation secured containers such as Clear Linux Containers. Each offers its […]
Prominent investors stock up on eBay, then activists flex muscle
An eBay sign is seen at an office building in San Jose, California May 28, 2014. REUTERS/Beck Diefenbach eBay‘s stock price slumped for most of last year but a number of prominent hedge funds were so convinced that change is on the horizon for the e-commerce company that they established new or added to existing […]
U.S. negotiating multibillion-dollar fine with Facebook: Report
The U.S. government and Facebook are negotiating a settlement over the company’s privacy lapses that could require the online social network to pay a multibillion-dollar fine, the Washington Post reported on Thursday. The newspaper said that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and Facebook had not agreed on an amount, citing two people it said were […]
Infibeam Avenues Q3 net profit zooms to Rs 26.6 cr
Infibeam Avenues has said its net profit grew manifold to Rs 26.6 crore during the December 2018 quarter from the year-ago period. The net profit stood at Rs 1.9 crore in the October-December 2017 period, Infibeam said in a statement. The company’s total revenue more than doubled to Rs 150.3 crore in the quarter, compared […]
Brands offering online discounts may face the wrath of brick-n-mortar stores
Offline stores will take action against brands if they don’t curb online discounting or stop launching online-exclusive models at lower prices. With Amazon and Flipkart back to normal as their large sellers have resumed operations, brick-and-mortar stores selling smartphones, computers and consumer electronics fear deep discounting may continue in ecommerce. This follows a brief period […]
For entrepreneurs, it’s business @ speed of tweets
If politicians, film stars, law enforcement agencies make direct connect with the people on Twitter, new-age entrepreneurs can’t wait to hitch a ride. Twitter is the best way to get the most constructive feedback at the earliest, according to entrepreneurs who use the micro-blogging site to the hilt when it comes to matters around tech […]