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The World Needs More Subprime Loans
By Dan Gross What the world needs right now is more subprime lending?a lot more of it. Yes, I know that in the public imagination, subprime lending is the scourge responsible for crippling the U.S. financial system. The massive extension of credit to people who lacked extensive credit histories and documented wages seems, in hindsight, supremely stupid. But far from the madding, depressed crowds of Wall Street, billions of people are starving for credit. Lending tiny sums t...
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HUL to take water purifiers to villages
The country?s largest consumer products company by turnover, Hindustan Unilever Ltd, or HUL, plans to launch Pureit, its water purifier brand, in rural markets by year-end, targeted at relatively well-off village households that are able to afford its recurring cost. Pureit, which marked the company?s entry into the consumer durables business, was introduced in 2005 in Chennai and then in other southern markets before its national launch early this year. Once the roll-out o...
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Pop!Tech Launches Social Innovation Fellows Program
Pop!Tech (www.poptech.org), the renowned annual ideas summit and social innovation network, today unveiled the 2008 Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellows: a corps of high-potential change agents incubating breakthrough ? or ?big bet? ? approaches to the world?s most pressing social, economic and environmental challenges. Each Fellow is working on a transformative solution to a critical global challenge, in categories such as sustainable energy, human rights, education, economic developme...
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CavinKare to take on HUL, ITC in bottled shampoo biz
CavinKare, a Chennai-based unlisted FMCG company known for its Chik brand, has embarked on a strategy which will test its mettle as a low-cost bottled shampoo-maker in the southern markets. The company, which has successfully competed with multinationals, including Hindustan Unilever (HUL), in the sachet segment to retain leadership in key southern markets, will now have to prove its acumen in the bottled shampoo segment, which is increasingly getting competitive with the new marketin...
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Power to the Bottom
By Lily Huang In Tajikistan, Georgetown graduate student Dan Zuckerman is the face of Kiva, a San Francisco-based microlending organization operating in a region that currently hums with nearly 3,000 Kiva-sponsored entrepreneurs. Zuckerman has to get to know them and act as their bridge to their remote lenders by sharing their stories, both with the people providing loans and with the local microcredit institution, MLF MicroInvest, which is Kiva’s partner. In all ...
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IGNIA Fund I Co-leads US$6.0 Million Investment in Primedic, Mexican Healthcare Provider to the Base
Monterrey, Mexico, Sept. 3 /PRNewswire IGNIA Fund I, LP announced today that it has committed US$3.0 million to Primedic SAPI de CV as co-lead in a US$6.0 million first round of financing for the Company. Primedic, formerly known as Transparencia Medica, is a leading provider of healthcare services in Monterrey, currently operating three clinics and one radiological imaging facility. This funding will enable Primedic to rapidly expand operations to other cities in Mexico and to at...
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A Market at the Bottom of the Pyramid?
Over the years, it has become fashionable to talk about the business opportunity offered by those at the bottom of the (economic) pyramid. Many national and international seminars have been conducted to highlight this hitherto undiscovered gold-mine. Any challenge to the business rationale for pursuing such a market is considered heretical and almost blasphemous. Under the assumption that it is the responsibility of all business managers to generate the optimum (and certainly a minimu...
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Strong partnership key to success in bottom of the pyramid markets
For those at the ?bottom of the pyramid? (BoP), the four billion people or so living on less than two dollars a day, life is hard. Although collectively they have considerable combined purchasing power, they have up to now been traditionally overlooked by businesses. However, major multinational corporations (MNCs) are now seeing opportunities in developing products for the BoP markets, while making a difference to the lives of the poor people. ?For this concept to work, there needs...