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Would You Like a Soda with Your Small Loan?
SKS Microfinance, India’s largest microfinance institution (MFI), aims to raise up to $353 million in a closely watched IPO that has already drawn top anchor investors. As India’s largest MFI and the first to do an IPO, SKS is answering lots of questions : Should MFIs charge ...
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- South Asia
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Innovating Solutions for India’s Challenges
Last week, Kapil Sibal unveiled the prototype of a Rs 1,500 tablet pc aimed at providing an ultra-low-cost solution targeted towards making computer literacy accessible to those who are at the bottom of the pyramid. The minister believes that not only it is possible to see a commercial launch of this prototype as early as in 2011, but also a price-point which could eventually be as low as Rs 500. A few months ago, Tata Group launched an ultra-l...
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- South Asia
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For Love or for Money? SKS Microfinance IPO Stirs Debate
MUMBAI, India (AP) - An Indian company that makes tiny loans to villagers aims to raise up to $354 million in an initial public offering, a move critics fear will encourage the microfinance lender - India’s largest - to put shareholders above the poor it serves. SKS Microfinance’s share sale, launched Wednesday, has already drawn the ire of one of the leading lights in the field. A publicly traded company’s traditional obligation is...
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- South Asia
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Youth Consumers are Key for Godrej
If a brand is doing well, growing year after year, why does it need to transform? That’s the question Godrej must have asked itself before going for its corporate re-branding effort in 2008. Present in around 27 product categories with close to 100 products, brand Godrej suddenly donned vibrant colours whileretaining its signature style in its logo at the start of the Indian Premier League 1 in 2008. ...
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- South Asia
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The New India: Social Entrepreneurship as a Family Affair
BANGALORE -- Neelam Chhiber met her husband Jacob Mathew in graduate school, the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad. Today, with their 19-year-old son Nishant, they are giving me one family’s story of the improvisational networking and social entrepreneurship that are all the rage in digital India. It’s not all monster business yet, and probably never will be. In the Chhiber-Mathew case...
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- South Asia
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Not the Typical Charity Case: Profits from SKS IPO
Investors linked to a charity stand to receive millions of dollars when a company they supported in lending to the poor in India goes public next week. The charity, Unitus , abruptly dismissed most of its staff this month , saying it h...
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- South Asia
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Mobile Applications for the Masses
It was in the middle of last year that we decided to launch the mobile award as an advocacy and innovation reference platform, and named it mBillionth to work towards enabling mobile as a tool to make every critical content and service reach the bottom of the pyramid-the billionth person. With rigorous exercise across South Asia through various partnerships and help, we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Consider this: We got more than...
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- South Asia
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Creating a Consumption Class Out of the Poor
The late management guru CK Prahalad told us that there is a market at the bottom of the pyramid. Indian companies discovered that with the Re1 shampoo sachet. Ratan Tata believes that there is a huge market for the bottom-of-the-line Nano. But there is something missing here: the bottom below the bottom of the economic pyramid, where the fight is for the next meal. Subsistence living means there’s no market. This is job No 1 for our anti-p...
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- South Asia
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