Deepika makes more money than husband Ranveer, says Forbes India Rich List
The Forbes India Celebrity 100 list for 2018 has adjudged Bollywood star Deepika Padukone as the highest earning woman celebrity in the country. She earned an estimated Rs 112.8 crore in the 12 months ending September 2018 and was ranked 4 in the celebrity list for India.
In comparison, her husband Ranveer Singh earned around Rs 84.67 crore and was ranked 8 on the list.
Salman Khan was Number 1 for the third time in the rankings with earnings of more than Rs 253 crore during the period, which included films, TV appearances, and brand endorsements.
Salman is followed by cricket legend Virat Kohli (Rs 228.09 crore) and fellow Bollywood actor Akshay Kumar (Rs 185 crore).
While Aamir Khan (Rs 97.5 crore) and Amitabh Bachchan (Rs 96.17 crore) retained a place in the top 10, Shahrukh Khan dropped out of the top 10 (he was ranked 2 last year) to rank at 13 with earnings of Rs 56 crore.
Priyanka Chopra’s fall was even more drastic from #7 to #49 with earnings of Rs 18 crore. In all the total number of women in the list stood at 18 as compared to 21 last year.
The Forbes report pegged the cumulative earnings at Rs 3,140.25 crore, an increase of 17% yoy.
Food delivery company Zomato has been witnessing a series of CXO-level exits over the past two years.
The latest exit is that of the company’s CFO Sameer Maheshwary, who has put in his papers within six months of joining. Maheshwary, who is an alumnus of Delhi College of Engineering and Alliance Manchester Business School, has reportedly communicated that he is “moving on to pursue different professional and personal interests”.
For now, COO Gaurav Gupta will take the mantle as interim CFO as the company looks for a suitable candidate. In March this year, co-founder Pankaj Chaddha left the company, curiously on the same day when it raised US$ 150 million from Ant Financial.
Gupta took over as COO and Mukund Kulashekharan was made Chief Business Officer. However, Kulashekharan resigned in June. In 2017, the company’s then COO Deepak Gulati had resigned along with Samir Kuckreja, who had then headed its cloud-based PoS system.
New senior-level hiring continues in the meantime for the company, which has just acquired drone-based delivery startup TechEagle Innovations according to another recent news update.
Sun Pharma and Dilip Shanghvi face investor backlash after whistleblower report
Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd has run into rough weather ever since a whistleblower report has raised serious questions on the company and its promoter Dilip Shanghvi.
The report, which runs into around 150 pages, contains serious allegations that include insider trading, using State machinery to arm-twist target companies, using funds raise by opaque foreign currency convertible bonds, booking notional losses to save on tax payment. Australian brokerage firm Macquarie has further criticised the company for interesting links “certain individuals, FPI entities, market manipulation cases, lending activity”.
Despite the company issuing clarifications, the stock has fallen by more than 15% over seven trading sessions. It is clear that Dilip Shanghvi’s responses to questions are not satisfactory enough.
An instance is the use of Jermyn Capital (which had links with Ketan Parekh and Dharmesh Doshi) as co-manager along with JPMorgan Chase & Co for its FCCB issue in 2004. Shanghvi has countered that corporate governance norms have changed significantly since then, so the same benchmarks cannot be applied. But there are allegations of recent irregularities as well, including the sharp rise in loans disbursed by Sun Pharma to Rs 2,242 crore compared to Rs 69.8 crore in the previous year.
Investors are deeply concerned regarding the possibility of a regulatory probe into the company, and the imbroglio is not expected to die down very soon.
CarDekho raising US$ 100 million in funding round led by Sequoia Capital
Girnarsoft, which owns online auto classified firm CarDekho has raised US$ 100 million in its latest round of funding led by Sequoia Capital. Existing investor Hillhouse Capital is also investing in this round, which values CarDekho at US$ 400 million to 500 million.
This is a modest improvement over CarDekho’s valuation of US$ 360 million during the previous funding round in 2016. Sequoia will make the investment through its global growth fund which is estimated to have a corpus o US$ 8 billion. The investment firm is planning to make late stage investments in India, Southeast Asia and the US and CarDekho is one of its first bets.
Helmed by Co-founder and CEO Amit Jain, CarDekho has reported significant improvement in its balance sheet in FY 2018, with revenues growing by around 40% yoy to Rs 160 crore and losses coming down by around 50% yoy to Rs 70 crore.
Even as classifieds have proved hard to scale, the used car business has been a major growth driver and accounts for 20% of CarDekho’s total revenues. In fact, CarDekho disbursed Rs 1,000 crore in loans through its financing business as compared to Rs 200 crore in the previous year.
It also processes 5,600–6,000 policies per month with more than Rs 100 crore in monthly premiums.
Tiger Global invests in facilities management startup Facilio, signals return to India
Agroup of investors led by Tiger Global and existing investor Accel have concluded a US$ 6.4 million Series A funding round in Facilio, which provides real-time facilities management to real estate companies.
With this investment, Tiger Global has returned to India, after making a fortune with its exits from investments in Flipkart and Ola. The New York-based investment firm had stopped investing over the past two years, and has now raised around US$ 3.75 billion for private market investments. Accel Partners had pumped in US$ 1 million worth of seed funding in Facilio in March 2018.It was started by former Zoho employees
Prabhu Ramachandran, Rajavel Subramanian, Yogendra Babu and Krishnamoorthu Rangasamy. The startup has a futuristic business model and provides commercial real-estate owners with internet of things (IoT)-driven facilities management for buildings. Its integrated software reportedly helps companies bring down operational costs by 5–10% and increase asset life cycle by 20–25%.
In a statement, Tiger Global Management partner Lee Fixel acknowledged that data-driven efficiencies to enable better operations and superior occupant experience will be the future in the commercial real estate business. He added “On a global basis, facilities management services and energy spend by buildings each account for more than a trillion dollars.”
RBI keeps rates unchanged
The Reserve Bank of India’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) has maintained a neutral stance in its monetary policy announcement on Wednesday, keeping the policy rate unchanged at 6.5%.
The regulator has pegged GDP growth at 7.4% for the current year, but cut the forecast for next year to 7.5%. Additionally, RBI has cut the inflation forecast for the remainder of FY 2017–18, pointing to the drop in crude oil prices, rise in rupee valuation and food ‘deflation’.
The current projection for inflation stands at 2.7–3.2% for H2, 2017–18 as compared to 3.9–4.5% made earlier. RBI has also begun pumping in more liquidity to the economy, through a phased reduction of 25 basis points every quarter in the statutory liquidity ratio (SLR) over the next six quarters.
RBI Governor Urijit Patel stated, “Given the assessment that growth will remain healthy for the rest of the year, the MPC retained its stance at calibrated tightening so as to buy time to pause, reflect and undertake future policy action with more robust inflation signals. If upside risks do not materialize or are muted in their impact as reflected in incoming data, there is a possibility of space opening up for commensurate policy actions by the MPC.” Bond markets viewed this as a possibility of a future rate cut by RBI and the 10-year bond yield dropped by 13 bps during trade.
