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Driving Toward the $2,200 Car
Price is the key. Motorbikes and scooters in India retail for a relatively affordable $600 to $1,500. But most cars go for at least $4,500 -- one reason so few are sold. Local automakers are racing to create cars that would retail for 100,000 rupees -- roughly $2,200, or just half as much as the lowest-priced models sold today. At that magic price point, the reasoning goes, sales could double from last year’s total of 900,000 vehicles. ...
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- Business 2.0
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Trading on its reputation, the auction giant gambles on an Indian service
Last month, eBay, the world?s largest online auction site with a market capitalization of $52 billion, announced an agreement to acquire Baazee for $50 million. The move follows eBay?s acquisition of EachNet in China and Korea?s Internet Auction Company in 2003, and Taiwan?s NeoCom Technology in 2002. Like many other Internet companies, from Yahoo, to Google, to Amazon, eBay has to make a leap of faith when it expands into emerging markets. While India, for example, has a relatively small ...
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- Red Herring
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World Bank Challenged: Are Poor Really Helped?
Wealthy nations and international organizations, including the World Bank, spend more than $55 billion annually to better the lot of the world’s 2.7 billion poor people. Yet they have scant evidence that the myriad projects they finance have made any real difference, many economists say. That important fact has left some critics of the World Bank, the largest financier of antipoverty programs in developing countries, dissatisfied, and they have begun throwing down an essential challen...
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- The New York Times
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Vodacom customers increase to more than 12.4-million
Vodacom has cellular networks in South Africa, Tanzania, Lesotho, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Mozambique. The non-South African operations now comprise 1.8-million or 14.8% of the total Group customer base. Vodacom increased its South African customer base by 8.8% to 10.6-million (just over 9-million prepaid and 1.5-million contract) during the reporting period. Read ful...
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- Press Release - Vodacom
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Once Focused on the Ultrarich,It Now Eyes the ’Unbanked’
Citigroup is also moving down market in other developing countries in a bid to wring profits out of the working class. In part, it is betting that a healthy middle class will emerge in Mexico, Brazil, India, China and a handful of other fast-growing economies. The growth potential, as Citigroup executives see it, is enormous, particularly with credit cards, where profit margins in places like Mexico are fat. ...
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- The Wall Street Journal
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MTV’s Passage to India
...MTV India isn’t built for today or even tomorrow. It’s one of a handful of global businesses targeted for investment by Viacom because of their potential. (MTV channels in China, Japan, and Mexico are among the others.) Right now about 25 million homes in India can watch MTV. There’s room to grow, given that India has more than 100 million TV homes?and that more than half of India’s one billion people are under 25. ... Cable operators keep signing up new subscribers. Adv...
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- Fortune
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New IBM Unit to Target Emerging Markets
That demand is underscored by IBM’s recent second-quarter financial results, which showed double- and triple-digit growth in open technologies such as Linux and grid computing. In a recent letter to IBM shareholders and employees, Chairman Sam Palmisano reported that the Armonk, N.Y., company’s revenue in the first half of the year grew by 35 percent, to $1.9 billion, in the emerging markets of China, Brazil, Eastern Europe and India. ...
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- eWeek.com
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Grameen Foundation USA Generates Business Ownership Among the Poorest of Poor Women Worldwide
BlueOrchard Finance s.a., and Developing World Markets, Inc. are preparing to release millions of dollars into the hands of micro-entrepreneurs through microfinance institutions in nine developing countries. This financial deal, the largest transaction of its kind to date, is a true landmark. Though bond offerings for international microfinance have often been talked about and even attempted prior to today, this is the first and largest transaction in U.S. capital markets to exclusively f...
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- Financial News
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