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After China and Malaysia, OYO Starts Off with Operations in London

16Jul By Gauri SinghNo Comments

BUSINESS

After China and Malaysia, OYO Starts Off with Operations in London

The online hospitality service provider OYO seems to be on an expansion spree. Soon after spreading its footsteps in countries like China, the company has landed in London and already begin with the operations. The Softbank-backed firm has been offering bookings in Sussex Gardens, Paddington, London. According to the reports, an OYO Townhouse property in London was seen recently. After foodtech unicorn Zomato, it is said to be the second Indian startup to have expanded to London. However, there is no option to book a hotel at the previously mentioned property through the app or website, it is being guessed that the pricing would be in the range of Rs 6,500 to Rs 8,000. Currently, OYO claims to operate 8,500 hotels and 70,000 rooms over 230 cities in India. ...

Amazon Web Services Eyes to Sell its Networking Switches

14Jul By Gauri SinghNo Comments

BUSINESS

Amazon Web Services Eyes to Sell its Networking Switches

Amazon’s cloud service business ‘Amazon Web Services’ is eyeing to sell its own networking switches to the business customers. Amazon Web Services could price its white-box switches 70-80% less than comparable switches from networking giant Cisco, as reported by one of the persons with direct knowledge of the unit's plan. The company expects to launch the switches in the next 18 months. It stated that the devices will include open-source software and unbranded hardware known as "white-box" switches and will be introduced with built-in connections to AWS cloud services, such as servers and storage. Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers reliable, scalable, and inexpensive cloud computing services. It is a subsidiary of Amazon.com and offers on-demand cloud computing platforms to individuals...

Paytm Forays Into The Forex Space, Aims to Expand

11Jul By Gauri SinghNo Comments

BUSINESS

Paytm Forays Into The Forex Space, Aims to Expand

Digital payment giant Paytm, which is owned by One97 Communications is now entering the forex space, for the exchange of 20 international currencies on its platform. The service is being carried forward in partnership with Centrum Direct as stated by the company. Earlier, it had been rumored that Paytm is eyeing to foray into the foreign exchange and international remittance space and now finally it is happening. According to the reports, Paytm will at first start with foreign exchange services. It may enter cross-border remittance services, both outward and inward. “We have been witnessing an unprecedented growth for international travel bookings on our platform. We learned that our customers usually are in a need of a trusted and seamless forex service for themselves. We considere...

ALT Balaji Plans to Invest Rs 500 Crore To Enhance Customer Base

9Jul By Gauri SinghNo Comments

BUSINESS

ALT Balaji Plans to Invest Rs 500 Crore To Enhance Customer Base

The Balaji Telefilms owned video on demand platform, ALT Balaji has major plans to invest up to Rs 500 crore over the next three years. The Reliance-Jio backed company aims to make its content offerings strong and sturdy. The subscription-based video platform began to operate last year in April and now its objective is to highly increase its customer base and double the number of subscribers from 2.8 million currently to over 8 million by 2021, excluding the Jio customers. "We plan to invest Rs 150-170 crore every year, out of which 70% would be invested in strengthening our content offerings. Over the next 3 years, we plan to invest Rs 450-500 crore," said Nachiket Pantvaidya, CEO of ALTBalaji. The CEO also stated that almost 95 percent of the content on ALT Balaji is original and fu...

Beauty Retailer Nykaa Launches Its Men’s Grooming Website

6Jul By Gauri SinghNo Comments

BUSINESS

Beauty Retailer Nykaa Launches Its Men’s Grooming Website

E-commerce beauty retailer Nykaa has announced the launch of its online marketplace exclusively for men called Nykaaman.com. The website will be in action from today and will have products across various categories. With this move, the company intends to foray into the $1.4 billion men’s grooming market in India. Also, this will help the company to scale up its revenue of two years by 10 percent. This news comes a year after many other e-commerce companies have also entered the segment of men’s fashion including Voonik and Limeroad. NykaaMan.com will offer products under the categories like shaving, hair care, grooming kits, bath & body, beard care, sexual wellness and sports nutrition which will include over 150-200 brands including The Shave Doctor, Kielh’s, Clinique for Men an...

Skoda to Invest Around $1 Billion in India

5Jul By Gauri SinghNo Comments

BUSINESS

Skoda to Invest Around $1 Billion in India

Volkswagen Group, which is the parent company of Skoda India Auto has plans to invest an amount of $1.16 billion (Rs 79 billion) in the Indian operations of Skoda under a programme named 'India 2.0'. The basic purpose of this investment is to develop fresh products and improve localization. Along with this, it will involve the creation of an engineering centre, capacity enhancement, R&D, new technologies and increase production. According to the reports, the investment programme – ‘India 2.0’ will take place between 2019 and 2021. Skoda Auto's Chief Executive Bernhard Maier said, "Experts predict that in the next few years India is going to become the third-largest automotive market worldwide. With our 'India 2.0' project we are now creating the right conditions for sustainable gro...

HDFC’s Deepak Parekh Speaks Publicly About Succession Planning

5Jul By Gauri SinghNo Comments

BUSINESS

HDFC’s Deepak Parekh Speaks Publicly About Succession Planning

Deepak Parekh, the Chairman of Housing Development Finance Corporation Ltd. (HDFC) stated in his annual letter to the shareholders that now, he will give utmost importance to succession planning and that will be his priority. The main purpose is to ensure a smooth transition within the HDFC group. While this session, Parekh claimed that the succession plan would take around 18-24 months for preparation. He also stated that the boards of the respective companies will consider both internal and external sources of recruitment for filling the positions. “Personally, the task of ensuring frictionless transition is and will be on the top of my mind. That said, it is not as if there will be an announcement right away,” Parekh said. “As passionate and energetic as so...

PayPal To Employ 600 Techies In AI and ML Domain Soon

2Jul By Gauri SinghNo Comments

BUSINESS

PayPal To Employ 600 Techies In AI and ML Domain Soon

The American online payment company Paypal is considering India as a market for increasing growth and therefore, is planning to appoint over 600 techies by the end of this year that is by December, in the machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) sector. Paypal is one of the largest online payment services till date that supports online money transfers and serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper methods like cheques and money orders. "We plan to increase the headcount by 600 in 2018. Some of the job roles that PayPal intends to hire for include application developers- Java, Node JS; back-end developers- data engineers, data experts and product managers," Guru Bhat, GM Technology & Head of Engineering, PayPal said. "For PayPal, the India centres are key...

OYO to Invest US$20 Million to Fuel its Malaysian Expansion

30Jun By Lavina TolaniNo Comments

BUSINESS

OYO to Invest US$20 Million to Fuel its Malaysian Expansion

India’s largest budget hotel network and hospitality chain, OYO Hotels is gearing up to expand its operations in Malaysia and has committed an initial capital of US$20 million for the expansion. The company has plans to expand its Malaysian team from 50 to 500 employees where the leadership and employees will comprise of Malaysian locals. Commenting on the recent development, Abhinav Sinha, chief operating officer, OYO Hotels said, OYO plans to create more than 5,000 new jobs in Malaysia over the next few years, and achieve “twenty-fold increase” by onboarding 1,000 hotels over the next 12 months. We are looking to expand into Sarawak, adding on to the list of 50 hotels it has across major cities in Malaysia, including Kuala Lumpur, Penang, Langkawi, Johor and Melaka. According to Sin...

OYO Makes Entry Into The Wedding Space Through Auto Party

30Jun By Gauri SinghNo Comments

BUSINESS

OYO Makes Entry Into The Wedding Space Through Auto Party

India’s largest hotel network OYO has now made an entry into the fragmented marriages and wedding space business in the country with the help of its separate website called Auto Party. The Auto Party website enables the customers to make use of banqueting and wedding planning services provided by the company. Now, the company is planning to provide united services such as banqueting space, catering services and decoration as well as devoted event planners for the customers integrated under the OYO mobile application. “We were doing a lot of word of mouth MICE events in our hotels and a lot of people used to come to us and ask for bigger spaces for hosting events like marriages. In the existing banquets, the entire experience for customers was very much broken. The banquets were not pro...

Infibeam to raise 2000 Cr to set up its payments bank

30Jun By Lavina TolaniNo Comments

BUSINESS

Infibeam to raise 2000 Cr to set up its payments bank

Ahmedabad based E-commerce Major Infibeam is now ready to expand its business in IT segment as it looking forward to setting up its payment bank along with raising $292 Mn (INR 2000 Cr). In a recent company's general meeting held on June 28, 2018 shareholders have approved a change in the company name from “Infibeam Incorporation Limited” to "Infibeam Avenues Limited", according to a regulatory filing. The company has sought shareholders approval to apply for authorisation from Reserve Bank of India for its payment bank. It is also approached the apex body to seek approval to explore the business opportunity in the manufacturing of IT hardware. Post-RBI Approval, Infibeam wants to leverage its financial technology and expand business in the domain to issue all kind of prepaid paym...

Microsoft partners with cloud enterprise platform InMobi

27Jun By Lavina TolaniNo Comments

BUSINESS

Microsoft partners with cloud enterprise platform InMobi

Microsoft Corp has announced a global partnership with a marketers enterprise platform InMobi to enable new-age CMOs in their transformational journey from digital to mobile marketing. Under the new partnership, InMobi will be migrating to Microsoft Azure as its preferred cloud provider sealing a technology collaboration with Microsoft. At the same time, InMobi is also expanding its platform through its InMobi Marketing Cloud. As per company's website, The Marketing Cloud will enable marketers to get a 360-degree view of every customer, uncovering insights that help them design customer journeys for engagement, action and measurement while remaining committed toward the privacy rights of the customer. Commenting on the strategic partnership with InMobi, Satya Nadella, CEO, Microso...