Online grocery hit critical mass in lockdown: HUL

Some of the gains made by the e-commerce sector during the COVID-19 lockdown is permanent and retailing will never be the same again even after the pandemic, said Sanjiv Mehta, chairman and managing director of Hindustan Unilever Ltd. As India’s largest supplier of consumer goods, HUL has a lot at stake in health and longevity […]

GTPL not overly worried about Airtel’s LCO broadband scheme

GTPL Hathway, one of India’s top cable TV and cable internet providers, indicated it was not overly worried about telecom players like Bharti Airtel luring away its local cable operator partners under their new LCO partnership strategy. Bharti Airtel had announced some weeks ago that it plans to authorize local cable operators (LCOs) to resell […]

Reliance Jio reverses two-decade-long fall in wired phone users

Reliance Jio’s wired connectivity service, called Jio Fiber, has finally achieved what many thought was impossible — break the two-decade long declining trend in the number of wired phone connections in India. The number of wire-line connections in India started declining around two decades ago as mobile call tariffs fell sharply, spurring BSNL customers to […]

Jio need not pay RCom’s AGR dues under sharing rules:DoT

India’s communication ministry today said that there was no possibility of an operator being asked to pay the dues of another operator simply because it has entered into a spectrum sharing agreement with the other. This was clarified by Minister of State Sanjay Dhotre in reply to a question by MP K Subbarayan on whether […]

Work from home boosts TV viewership in India

Even as evening TV viewership has fallen back to its pre-COVID levels after the COVID-19 lockdown, overall TV viewership continues to remain elevated due to higher levels of daytime consumption in the era of work-from-home. According to numbers disclosed by Sunil Lulla, CEO of TV viewership measurement agency BARC, TV viewership in India has gone […]

Does VODAFONE IDEA have a FUTURE?

As Vodafone Idea unveils a new brand identity, the financial troubles facing the company has as thrown into question the very future of the Indian telecom operator. There has been speculation that American telco Verizon or online retail giant Amazon may infuse money into the operator, but such rumors have been quashed by the Indian […]

COVID-19 lockdown proves a blessing for DTH providers

The Direct to Home (DTH) satellite broadcasting service has emerged as perhaps the only segment that has seen a clear benefit from the COVID-19 lock-down, with all three listed players seeing an increase in their customer revenue during the lock-down. The biggest jump in revenue was reported by Airtel Digital, which saw its revenue jump […]

Domestic textile market to remain subdued in 2020 – Arvind Ltd

Arvind Ltd, one of India’s biggest textile and garment manufactures, said its business revenue was down about 37% in August compared to the previous year due to the impact of the Coronavirus lockdown and it expects domestic market to remain subdued till early 2021. Revenue in August was at Rs 414 cr in August, compared […]

Shoppers Stop to link physical stores with Amazon shopfront

Department store chain Shoppers Stop, the pioneer of organized retail in India and one of the country’s largest retailers of fashion and beauty products, will connect its individual stores to its Amazon shopfront by next month as part of its omni-channel strategy. It also said it would focus on Tier 2 and Tier 3 towns […]

Reliance speeds up Jio Fiber connection deployments

Reliance Jio, which started wired broadband operations in September last year, has started speeding up the roll-out of its Jio Fiber service after an initial slow-down. The company started the service with around 8 lakh connections as of October end, most of which were converts from its trial service. Over the next two months, it […]

Mall footfalls down 75%-80% – Prestige Estates Projects

Prestige Estates Projects Ltd, which operates nine malls including The Forum Mall in Bangalore, said footfalls are down 75%-80% at malls due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Speaking to investors after detailing the company’s June quarter results last week, company officials also said they were seeing signs of stress among customers of residential properties, even though […]

D-Mart working on new cities, but COVID-19 impact to show

D-Mart, India’s most famous deep discount retail chain, said it is working on expanding its footprint beyond its current footprint of 214 locations, but the ongoing COVID-19 will impact the number of new stores that will be opened this year. The company, which started with just two stores in Mumbai in 2002-03, expanded to 214 […]

NRIs, Digital boost real estate sales for Godrej Properties’ in Q1

Godrej Properties, the fastest growing of India’s real estate majors, saw a surge of NRI (non-resident Indian) customers as well as a huge pick-up online sales during the COVID-19 lock-down. Despite a harsh lock-down in place in India during most of the Apr-Jun quarter, the company managed to sell a whopping 2,130 homes during the […]

D-Mart warms up to e-commerce as JioMart expands

D-Mart, arguably India’s most successful low-cost retailer, may be looking at a multi-city e-commerce launch in coming days, after years of avoiding the sector citing the gruesome economics of online retail in India. Avenue Supermarkets, or D-Mart as most people would know it, is known for its fanatic focus on keeping costs down and its […]

Bharat Matrimony wants to lure customers from ‘all tiers’

Matrimony.com, one of the largest matchmaking companies in the world, said it continue to offer discounts and special pricing to attract new internet users who are coming online via the 4G wireless data revolution. The company, which operates the Bharat Matrimony website and others, has typically charged several thousand rupees for its paid membership. Only […]