| | | Question of the Week Thunder Unbottled is the title of a legendary Indian entrepreneur’s biography. Without checking, can you guess from the name who it is about? | | |  | Here's a great value proposition A digital subscription to Mint premium can be yours at just ₹213 per month. Check out the convenient and affordable plans we have for you here. | | Good Morning | | The News in Summary Jio Financial Services, the youngest of Mukesh Ambani’s businesses, is picking up speed with its chairman, K.V. Kamath, bringing in an old colleague to put together the team that will run the company. Meanwhile, headhunters and staffing firms have now confirmed in analyst calls what has only been whispered so far - Indian IT services firms are feeling the effects of a slowdown in their key markets and going slow on hiring. Elsewhere, one of India’s oldest green energy companies, ReNew Energy Global Plc, is looking to raise nearly a billion dollars through the sale of 1 gigawatt of its operational, clean energy capacity, while Aurobindo Pharma has been overtaken by Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories and Cipla Ltd in the sales ranking of Indian pharma firms. Finally, the Delhi high court has rejected a plea by Future Retail to terminate its proceedings against Amazon in a Singapore Arbitration Court. | | |  | | | | Kamath Drafts in ICICI Colleague to Staff Jio Financial Jio Financial Services, Mukesh Ambani’s newest bet for the future, is getting a move on with its recently appointed chairman K.V. Kamath, bringing in Manish Singh, a former colleague from ICICI Bank, to build a team for the business. Singh was earlier chief human resources officer at the Shanghai-based New Development Bank (NDB), which was then headed by Kamath. More senior bankers are expected to join Reliance’s financial service business which Macquarie Research, in a recent report titled, The Jio juggernaut—Can it rule the roost?, said could have a significant impact on existing non-banking financial services firms like Bajaj Finance and Paytm. That note had an immediate fallout leading to a 10% drop in the price of the Paytm stock, whose 75% fall caps the worst first-year share plunge among large IPOs over the past decade. | | | | Hiring Firms Feel the Heat of IT Slowdown With headhunters complaining that hiring by technology and e-commerce companies in the December quarter is 50% below last year’s levels and staffing firms led by Quess Corp, TeamLease Services and Naukri.com (part of InfoEdge) confirming its impact on their business, the slowdown in the Indian IT services sector is undeniable. The current hiring pattern is a reversal of the boom witnessed over the last two years when riding on strong demand for IT services, and staffing firms posted impressive revenue growth of 25-30%. With demand for their services dropping in markets like the US and Europe, many IT firms have frozen hiring and have also started cutting temporary staff, the bread and butter business of staffing firms. While the big Indian IT firms have so far contested that clients were holding back on technology spending because of economic uncertainty in the US and Europe, hiring trends indicate otherwise. Significantly, barring IT, hiring in other industries has remained stable, allowing these firms to post healthy revenue growth in the latest quarter. | | |  | | | | Here’s an unusual, markedly socialist podcast on the mass layoffs of tech workers by billionaire CEOs at Meta, Twitter and Amazon. | | | | | | | | ReNew Energy Looking to Sell Some Assets for a Billion Dollars As part of a capital recycling strategy that entails using collateralized lines of credit for fresh opportunities that come along and cash flow to pay down those lines of credit, ReNew Energy Global Plc is looking to sell 1 gigawatt of its operational, clean energy capacity at an enterprise value of around $1 billion. The sale would include its solar and wind assets with an equity value of around $300 million, with the proceeds to be reinvested in building new clean energy assets. ReNew, which has a 13.4GW portfolio with a commissioned capacity of 7.7GW, is open to selling a minority stake at the project level or going for an asset sale if it gets a good valuation. In August last year, ReNew Power Pvt. Ltd merged with Nasdaq-listed special purpose acquisition firm RMG Acquisition Corp. II (RMG II) to form a new entity, ReNew Energy Global. | | |  | | | | Aurobindo Drops in Pharma Pecking Order At a time its founder P.V. Ram Prasad Reddy’s son Sarath Chandra Reddy is under investigation by the enforcement directorate in the Delhi liquor scam case, Aurobindo Pharma has ceded its position as the country’s second-largest pharma company. With both Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories Ltd and Cipla Ltd beating the Hyderabad-based drugmaker by sales in the three months to 30 September, it marks the first change in the pecking order of the country’s $50 billion pharmaceutical industry in over seven years. Market leader Sun Pharma, however, continues unchallenged with sales of Rs 10,809 crore in the latest quarter. While Dr. Reddy’s and Cipla were helped along by growing sales of the generic version of the oral cancer drug Revlimid, weak sales and price decline for its current formulation business in the US have been a drag on Aurobindo’s revenue which declined sequentially for the second time in nine months. | | | | Delhi HC Sends Future Retail Back to Singapore Arbitration Court The Delhi high court rejected the Future Group’s plea seeking termination of its arbitration proceedings with its former partner Amazon.com in a Singapore arbitral court and ruled that the same must proceed as scheduled. Earlier, the Supreme Court had also observed that it would not allow stalling of the arbitration, saying the sanctity of such proceedings needed to be maintained. The case relates to the damages Amazon has sought from Future Group with respect to its 2019 investment of Rs 1,400 crore in Future Coupons Pvt. Ltd, with the US e-commerce giant arguing that its Indian partner had violated the terms of the deal by deciding to sell assets to Reliance Industries Ltd. The Singapore arbitrator has backed Amazon’s position. Following the collapse of the deal with Reliance, Future Retail argued before the Delhi high court that there was no basis for the Singapore tribunal to continue with the arbitration since the approval for the agreement based on which Amazon approached the tribunal had been suspended by the Competition Commission of India (CCI). The high court order comes as a serious blow to the cash-strapped firm looking for a possible buyer under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code. | | | | Last Word As Ramesh Chauhan prepares to bid adieu to Bisleri, a brand that he lifted to the very top of the $2.5 billion bottled water business in India, it is time to acknowledge the contribution of this extraordinary serial entrepreneur. Nearly 30 years ago, he sold Thums Up to Coca-Cola in tacit recognition of the odds against him in competing against two global cola giants with deep pockets. Yet the brand he created endures and is today the leading cola brand in the country. Ill health and a daughter reluctant to continue running the business may be forcing his hand in looking to sell Bisleri, most likely to Tata Consumer Products. Whoever buys it will finally know they are inheriting a true home-grown winner that’s shrugged aside pretenders from large multinationals to eke out a nearly 60% share of the bottled water market in the country. | | | | Answer to the Question Thunder Unbottled: From Thums Up To Bisleri by Patricia J. Sethi is the biography of Ramesh Chauhan | | | Do you have any questions? Send in your queries to sundeepkkhanna@gmail.com Were you forwarded this email? Did you stumble upon it online? Sign up here. | Please share your feedback with us What do you think about this newsletter? | | Written by Sundeep Khanna. Edited by Saikat Chatterjee. Produced by Divneet Singh. Send in your feedback to newsletters@livemint.com. | | | | | Download the Mint app and read premium stories | | | | | | View in Browser | Privacy Policy | Contact us You received this email because you signed up for Mint Top of the Morning or because it is included in your subscription. Copyright © HT Digital Streams. 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