BUSINESS UPDATES

Britannia Industries' net profit has dipped 5%

Britannia Industries' net profit (standalone) has dipped 5 per cent to

Rs 180 crore for the year ended March 31, 2009. Standalone net

sales have grown 20.4 per cent to Rs 3,112.21 crore.

For the fourth quarter of the year, the company reported net sales of

Rs 762 crore and profit from operations of Rs 62.5 crore, up 10 per

cent and 17 per cent respectively, over the corresponding quarter

last year. The company did not disclose net profit for the quarter.

Consolidated net profit for the fiscal year ended March 31 dipped

14.6 per cent to Rs 151.48 crore. Consolidated net sales rose 23 per

cent to Rs 3,421.23 crore (Rs 2,776.25 crore).

Vinita Bali, Managing Director, Britannia Industries, said, "The

Company has grown in a year of intense competitive activity, high commodity inflation and

economic uncertainty especially in the second half. Britannia continues to focus on driving

consumer offtake

and operational efficiencies to generate sustainable and profitable growth."

The company's board of directors has declared an interim dividend of Rs 40 per share

(amounting to 400 per cent of paid up equity share capital of the company) for the financial

year 200809.

Total payout including dividend distribution tax amounts to Rs 111.8 crore for

the year. The board also considered and decided that no final dividend would be

recommended to the shareholders for declaration at the ensuing annual general meeting.

Godrej Industries FY'09 net profit at Rs 111.47 crore

FMCG major Godrej Industries reported consolidated net profit of Rs

111.47 crore for the year ended March 31, 2009. The consolidated

results for the year are not strictly comparable with those of the previous

year," Godrej Industries said in a filing to the Bombay Stock Exchange.

The company had a net profit of Rs 167.82 crore for the same period

ended March 2008.

"In a difficult year for the global economy and consumer sentiment,

Godrej Industries has managed to create value through its constant focus on innovation,

management best practice, investment in human capital, and corporate governance," Godrej

Industries Limited, Chairman AB Godrej said.

Total income of the company stood at Rs 3,427.26 crore for the financial year ended March,

while it had a total income of Rs 2,983.50 crore in the same period year ago.

The board of directors of the company declared a final dividend of Rs 1.25 a piece to the

shareholders of the company for the financial year 200809.

Shares of Godrej Industries

settled at Rs 129.15, up 2.38 per cent on the BSE.

 

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Eicher Motors Q4 net profit at Rs 6.16 crore

Eicher Motors said its net profit for the quarter ended March 31,

2009 stood at Rs 6.16 crore, while it had a net profit of Rs 19.46

crore in the corresponding period previous fiscal.

The commercial vehicles business of the company was transferred

on a 'going concern' basis to VE Commercial Vehicles Ltd

(subsidiary of the company) with effect from July 1, 2008. Hence, the current quarter figures

are not comparable with the figures of previous quarter, Eicher Motors said in a filing to the

Bombay Stock Exchange.

Total income from operations stood at Rs 89.84 crore for the quarter under review. However,

it had a total income from operations at Rs 659.42 crore for the corresponding previous

quarter.

Pyramid Saimira suffers Rs 100 crore loss

Chennai based Pyramid Saimira Theatre Ltd (PSTL) said the

company suffered a business loss of over Rs 100 crore last

year which resulted in an erosion of working capital.

Meanwhile, N Narayanan, one of the promoters of the

company, took over as the new Chairman from P S

Saminathan, who will continue to remain Managing

Director.

Company executives were not available to comment.

PSTL's announcement to the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE), quoting Narayanan, said the

business loss was over Rs 100 crore, with issues like the Income Tax Department's move to

attach the company's accounts bringing PSTL into "serious" financial strain.

However, in an announcement to the BSE on January 30, 2009, the company had said the

group had lost Rs 40.32 crore on account of a Tamil film titled Kuselan; Rs 26.57 crore

towards IT

due and Rs 76.32 crore was provided for as an external loss towards foreign

exchange.

Bonfiglioli Transmissions to invest Rs 75 crore in

Chennai plant

Italy based gear box manufacturer Bonfiglioli

Transmissions is planning to invest around Rs 75 crore in its

Chennai plant by 2010. Since 2000, the company had

invested Rs 400 crore in the Thirumudivakkam facility, near

Chennai. The fresh investment, to be met through internal

accruals, would be for plant and machinery, said Sonia Bonfiglioli, Vice President and Chief

Executive Officer, Bonfiglioli Riduttori SPA.

Last year, India contributed Rs 310 crore to the company's turnover.

 

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The company manufactures equipment for windmill application in India. Apart from this, it

caters to industries such as machine tools, pharmaceutical, sugar, cement and construction.

She said the current domestic industrial gear box market was estimated to be around Rs 1,500

crore of which Bonfiglioli share stood at around 16 per cent. The company is targeting a

market share of 25 per cent in the near future. For this, it is looking at catering to industries

such as textiles; conveyors used industries like automobile and road construction.

Bonfiglioli is also bullish on the renewable energy sector. "Going forward we would like to

focus on solar and photovoltaic," said M Ganesh, CEO, Bonfiglioli Transmissions Pvt Ltd.

Last year, company's global business turnover stood at euro 200 million, of which renewable

energy contributed euro 150 million.

Munro wins international Booker

Canadian short story author Alice Munro has won the

third Man Booker International Prize.

She saw off competition from 13 other nominees,

including Australian twotime

Booker winner Peter

Carey and Briton James Kelman, to win the £60,000

award.

It is given every two years to a living author for an

entire body of work that has contributed to fiction across

the world stage.

Munro 77 years old, who lives in Ontario, said: "I am totally amazed and delighted."

Her first collection of stories, Dance Of The Happy Shades, published in 1968, won the

Governor General's Award, Canada's literary prize.

Her success was followed up by Lives Of Girls And Women (1971), which won a Canadian

Booksellers Association award.

This year's judging panel for the international Booker included Pulitzer prizewinning

author

Jane Smiley; writer, academic and musician Amit Chaudhuri; and writer, film script writer

and essayist, Andrey Kurkov.

They said in a statement: "Alice Munro is mostly known as a short story writer and yet she

brings as much depth, wisdom and precision to every story as most novelists bring to a

lifetime of novels.

"To read Alice Munro is to learn something every time that you never thought of before."

The international Booker was first awarded to Ismail Kadare, from Albania, in 2005, and then

to Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe in 2007.

 

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Submissions are not invited and judges compile their own lists, which this year included big

hitters such as Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa and 2001 Nobel Laureate VS Naipaul.

Glaswegian Kelman, who won the main Booker Prize in 1994 for How Late It Was, How

Late, was the only UK contender for the award.

Munro will receive the prize and a trophy at a ceremony on 25 June at Trinity College,

Dublin.

Tatas to invest Rs 20000 crore in core sector projects

Tata Realty and Infrastructure Limited (TRIL), a closelyheld

unit of Tata

Sons, plans to invest Rs 20,000 crore to build special economic zones,

roads, ports and other core sector projects in the next three years to take

advantage of a stable political environment and revival in the economy, a

top company official said.

TRIL is planning to raise an Rs 4,770 crore international infrastructure

fund by the end of the year to invest in its infrastructure projects. Tata

Housing Development Company, another unit of Tata Sons, recently launched a lowcost

housing project in Mumbai and has plans for similar projects in other parts of the country.

"There is a fundamental change in the country, and housing and infrastructure are clear focus

areas now. With a full mandate, government can back these projects to turn around the

economy," said R K Krishna Kumar, Chairman of TRIL and THDC and Director of Tata

Sons.

Tata Realty has already raised an Rs 3,500crore

offshore fund for investing in its real estate

projects, 20 per cent of which is deployed. The other 80 per cent will be used in the next three

years.

The company plans to invest nearly Rs 5,000 crore in property development, including three

SEZs in Chennai, Ahmedabad and Pune and a citycentre

project in Amritsar in the next three

years. TRIL is planning IT SEZs in eight locations, in which group company Tata

Consultancy Services (TCS) will be the anchor tenant. It is also planning to develop an SEZ

at Gopalpur in Orissa, in association with Tata Steel.

TRIL is foraying into roads and highways, with the fourlaning

of the Rs 1,400 crore PuneSolapur

highway and plans to invest Rs 5,000 crore to develop three to four road projects in

the next couple of years, said Sanjay G Ubale, Managing Director and Chief Executive

Officer of TRIL. TRIL recently signed for the PuneSolapur

project in partnership with

Italian infrastructure major, Atlantia, on May 19.

"We are also evaluating projects in metro railway and mono rail projects and development of

bus terminals. Though these are longgestation

projects, it makes sense to enter into new

areas, as commodity prices are low and you get companies to execute more easily now,'' said

Ubale.

The company has bid for the second phase of the Mumbai Metro project with its partner

Mitsubishi and is planning to bid for other metro train projects in the country, he said.

 

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The company has bid for Amritsar and Udaipur projects in partnership with Singaporebased

Changi Airports and plans to bid for Navi Mumbai and Nagpur airports when these come up

for bidding, Ubale said. TRIL has also given its proposal for the development of Sindhudurg

airport in Maharashtra.

TRIL is also bidding, for the second time, for development of Navi Mumbai railway stations,

as the railway ministry has invited rebids. TRIl was the second highest bidder in the first

instance. It is developing New Delhi Railway Station with Italy's Grandi Stazioni.

Haneke's 'The White Ribbon' wins Cannes top prize

Austrian director Michael Haneke's somber drama "The White Ribbon", a chilling story

about rural Germany in the buildup

to World War One, won the Palme d'Or for Best Film at

the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. Brillante Mendoza from the Philippines walked away with the

Best Director's Prize for "Kinatay", which literally means

"Butchered", a story based on kidnap, rape and murder

incidents.

The Jury Prize was shared by Andrea Arnold's teen story of

"Fish Tank" from Britain and Park Chan Wook's vampire tale

of "Thirst" from South Korea.

The enfant terrible of Chinese cinema, Lou Ye, won the Best

Screenplay Award for his tale of marital discord and

homosexual jealousy in "Spring Fever".

Banned by Beijing from making movies for six years after his 2006 controversial "Summer

Palace", Lou made "Spring Fever" secretly in Nanjing and also got it selected for the

Christoph Waltz got the Best Actor Award for his ruthless, sarcastic, comic, but brilliant

portrayal of Nazi Colonel Landa in Quentin Tarantino's World War II saga, "Inglorious

Basterds".

Charlotte Gainsbourg was adjudged the Best Actress for her role in Lars Von Trier's

"Antichrist". The Camera d'Or for the Best Debut Feature went to "Samson and Delilah by

Warwick Thornton".

Team Manmohan takes shape, 59 more ministers

inducted

The Union Council of Ministers was on Thursday

expanded with the induction of 59 ministers including

three former chief ministers Vilasrao Deshmukh, Farooq

Abdullah and Virbhadra Singh at the Cabinet level.

In all, 14 cabinet ministers, including DMK nominees M

K Alagiri, Dayanidhi Maran and A Raja, and

 

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Congress' Mallikarjun Kharge were sworn in by President Pratibha Patil, six days after Prime

Minister and 19 others took oath in the first instalment.

Seven Ministers of State with Independent Charge, including Praful Patel of NCP, Prithviraj

Chavan, Salman Khursheed and Jairam Ramesh and 38 Ministers of State were also sworn in

at a ceremony in the Rashtrapati Bhawan attended among others by Vice President Hamid

Ansari, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress President Sonia Gandhi.

With today's induction, the strength of the Union Council of Ministers goes up to 79,

including the Prime Minister, the same as the previous UPA government after the exit of

Shivraj Patil.

M S Gill, Selja, Subodhkant Sahay, G K Vasan, Pawan Kumar Bansal, Kantilal Bhuria were

the other cabinet ministers inducted today, all from Congress who have been elevated from

the status of Ministers of State. Mukul Wasnik, and MoS in the P V Narasimha Rao

government, has been brought in as a Cabinet Minister.

Sriprakash Jaiswal and Dinsha Patel have been elevated as Ministers of State with

Independent Charge while Delhi MP Krishna Tirath makes her ministerial debut in the same

category.

Prominent among the new ministers who were sworn in were Shashi Tharoor, a former UN

diplomat who won from Thiruvananthapuram, Sachin Pilot and Praneet Kaur, wife of former

Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh, and Agatha Sangma, daughter of former Lok Sabha

Speaker P A Sangma.

The expansion also saw induction of six Trinamool Congress MPs, four from DMK and one

from Muslim League. Of the 14 new Cabinet ministers, Kharge, a seniorleader from

Karnataka, Selja and Wasnik belong to Scheduled Caste while Bhuria belongs to Scheduled

Tribe. Tirath also belongs to Scheduled Caste.

Deshmukh, who belongs to dominant Maratha caste, had to quit as Chief Minister in the

aftermath of terror attack in Mumbai in November last year.

The other Ministers of State who would be sworn in are E Ahamed (Muslim League), V

Narayanasamy, Namo Narain Meena, Srikant Jena, Mullapally Ramachandran, A Sai

Prathap, Harish Rawat, D Purandeswari, Panabaka Lakshmi, Ajay Maken, Gurudas Kamat, K

H Muniyappa, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Jitin Prasada, M M Pallam Raju, Mahadev Khandela, and

K V Thomas (all Congress).

Other Congress leaders to make it to the Council of Ministers were Bharatsinh Solanki,

Tusharbhai Chaudhary, Arun Yadav, Prateek Prakashbapu Patil, R P N Singh, Vincent Pala

and Pradeep Jain.

 

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The TMC members Saugata Ray, Dinesh Trivedi, Sisir Adhikari, Sultan Ahmed, Mukul Roy

and Mohan Jatua also took oath.

Ministers of State from DMK were S S Palanimackam, who retains his place, actor D

Napolean, S Jagathrakshakan and S Gandhiselvan. Of the 59, 42 belong to Congress, taking

the total number of ministers from the party to 60, including the Prime Minister.

The new ministers inducted today include seven of DMK, six of TMC, two of NCP and one

each of National Conference and Muslim League. Out of 42 from Congress, 10 are Cabinet

ministers, six with Independent charge and 26 Ministers of State. In all, Congress has 28

Cabinet Ministers, including the Prime Minister.

Surprisingly, there is no representative in the Cabinet from Uttar Pradesh where Congress

saw a substantial revival in the Lok Sabha election.