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Bharti AirTel, Wal-Mart Sign Tie-Up Deal
Indian telecommunications company Bharti Airtel has signed a tie-up deal with Wal-Mart to open a chain of retail stores across the country, Sunil B. Mittal, Bharti Airtel’s chief executive officer, said Monday. Mittal declined to divulge the financial details of the deal, but said it would be a huge investment involving hundreds of stores in India. It is going to be a large investment. There will be stores across the country. We are going to be a big player in ...
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Apax Partners to Invest in India
Apax is looking for long-term investment and buyout opportunities in the fast-growing technology, telecom, retail and consumer, media, healthcare and financial services sectors. It also has several companies in its portfolio that may interest Indian firms as they scout for foreign assets to expand their reach and size. Indian entrepreneurs’ increasing appetite for foreign companies is drawing private equity firms with saleable companies in their portfolio to set up shop in India. London-base...
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GrameenPhone: A Solution to Rural Connectivity
But there was a twist: while the company would have direct subscribers like regular cellular companies, local entrepreneurs in villages would buy phones, rent them out ? with airtime ? to neighbours and friends who wanted to make calls. Iqbal Quadir found his exposure to Wall Street fascinating. One particular phenomenon caught his eye: People were buying unglamorous companies cheap, investing in them and selling them high. The process helped the companies, the consumers and made these investors...
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Internet Extends Reach of Bangladeshi Villagers
Villages in one of the world’s poorest countries, long isolated by distance and deprivation, are getting their first Internet access, all connected over cellphones. And in the process, millions of people who have no land-line telephones, and often lack electricity and running water, in recent months have gained access to services considered basic in richer countries: weather reports, e-mail, even a doctor’s second opinion. Cellphones have become a new bridge across the digi...
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USAID and IFC Join Forces to Help Developing World Businesses
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the International Finance Corporation (IFC), part of the World Bank Group, today signed a Memorandum of Understanding which opens the way for these organizations to jointly support a range of new grassroots business development projects in the developing world. Poverty alleviation has become a primary objective of development efforts, and this new collaboration will help to build and maintain democratic states that support improved and su...
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- Yahoo! Finance
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Aneel Karnani: Jobs, not microcredit, is the solution
Some clients of microcredit are certainly true entrepreneurs, and have created thriving businesses?these are the heart-warming anecdotes. But the vast majority of microcredit clients are caught in subsistence activities with no prospect of competitive advantage. Most studies suggest that microcredit is beneficial but only to a limited extent and the reality is less attractive than the promise. ? The Nobel Peace Price for 2006 was awarded to the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh and its founde...
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A More Powerful Path
But unlike the chaos-theory butterfly, business is not an uncalculating force of nature. It can behave with intention. Indeed, we have left the era in which business leaders were expected to treat their companies as mute, dumb giants, merely swinging pickaxes in a profit quarry. We are waking to the idea that if business inevitably shapes the future, it has a responsibility to choose what that future will be. Business changes the world--at every moment, in myriad ways, for good and ill. Decision...
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AMD drops low-cost PC effort
Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) has dropped its line of low-cost PCs that were geared for developing nations, according to a filing by the company. AMD (Sunnyvale, Calif.) dropped the Personal Internet Communicator (PIC), a device that cost $249 for the computer and a 15-inch monitor, according to the filing. It sold the device in China, India, Mexico and Russia, but the company lost $16 million in the first nine months of 2006 on the product. ’’Revenue from sales...
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