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Earnings growth rises to 6 quarter high India Inc reported strong earnings growth in the December 2017 quarter after declines in the previous two quarters. This was largely expected given the lower base effect due to demonetisation in the year-ago quarter. What’s more encouraging is that some analysts believe that the momentum will continue in the coming quarters. Improved sales volume, ability to increase product prices to pass on higher input costs, better project execution and increasing order books are some of the factors that support the optimism. In the December quarter, net profit of a sample of 2,043 companies rose to a sixquarter high of 27.5 per cent year-on-year. Net sales rose by 11.5 per cent. In the previous quarter, sales had risen by 8.7 per cent, while net profit had fallen by 1 per cent. The sample excluded banking and finance companies.After excluding oil and gas companies along with banks and finance entities, sales and profit growth in the December 2017 quart...

SEBI READIES P-NOTE FRAMEWORK FOR GIFT CITY Market regulator plans to relax norms for onshore securities Market regulator Sebi is readying a framework for issuance of participatory notes (p-notes) from international financial services centres such as GIFT City. It is in talks with FPIs, which act as issuers of p-notes, sources said. The move comes at a time when Indian bourses have terminated licensing of indices and data-feed agreements with their foreign counterparts. This will force overseas investors to either invest directly or come through GIFT City to trade in Indian securities. PAVAN BURUGULA writes The Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) is readying a framework for issuance of participatory notes (p-notes) from the international financial services centres (IFSCs) such as GIFT City. P-notes are derivative instruments that allow overseas investors to invest in a domestic security without having to directly register with Sebi. The market regulator is in talks wi...

GSTN to ensure stakeholder familiarity before reintroducing e-way bill GST Network Chairman Ajay Bhushan Pandey has said the company will try to ensure that stakeholders become fully familiar with the technology system before the re-rollout of the e-way bill system. Under the Goods and Services and Tax, which was rolled out from July 1 last year, transporters of goods worth more than Rs 50,000 are required to carry electronic or e-way bill. The e-way bill system was launched by GSTN on February 1 after conducting pilot for over a fortnight, but faced technical glitches following which its implementation had to be postponed. In an interview to PTI, Pandey said GSTN is conducting extended pilot for the e-way bill mechanism and has suggested to states that they should ask their transporters to undertake trial run for e-way bill generation on the portal. "As soon as there is a readiness of the system and stakeholders, we will roll it out. We are trying to do it as early as pos...

RBI norms add to NCLT burden The National Company Law Tribunal, already burdened with about 2,000 bankruptcy cases pending, may see a flurry of fresh cases that may affect time-bound resolution after the banking regulator revamped the way loan defaults are to be handled, lawyers and bankers said. Right now, only some of the large cases are being tried, but there are several cases in the SME (small and medium enterprise) and mid-cap space where we have done restructuring and it has failed. If we send so many of these cases to NCLT, I don’t know how the logistics will work,” said a banker. The RBI on Monday scrapped all debt restructuring schemes and made resolution of bad loans time bound with the Insolvency & Bankruptcy Code becoming the main tool to deal with defaulters. RBI said accounts with aggregate debt of more than Rs 2,000 crore will have to be taken to NCLT within 15 days if a resolution plan does not bear fruit in 180 days. “NCLT is already under stress because ...

India market is recovering after GST, says PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi Pepsico's business in India registered a "mid-single digit (volume) growth" during the quarter, she said Chairwoman and chief executive officer (CEO) of PepsiCo, Indra Nooyi, on Tuesday said the consumer market in India was on a recovery path after initial disruptions caused due to the implementation of the goods and services tax (GST). In the past few weeks, top executives from major fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) firms, including Unilever, Mondelez, and Colgate-Palmolive, were pinning their hopes on recovering from the initial GST hiccups in the country. “After GST, the India market is coming back”, Nooyi said. “We want to do better top line growth; there are headwinds like retail disruption. Consumers are health conscious, not consuming as much they used to. There are big brands that are not doing well, (on the other hand,) some smaller brands are doing good business,” Nooyi said during an ...

PROMOTERS GETA SETTLEMENT PUSH New rule may add to provisioning burden but aid in loan recovery Promoters of any large account in which the banking sector had an exposure of Rs 20 billion and above were in for trouble if they did not settle their dues soon, said experts. The impact on banks in terms of bad debt numbers and provisioning will remain elevated. estructuring, should be put through a resolution plan if the accounts were in default. If an account is in default with one bank, other lenders in the consortium will have to try and make the account good. Otherwise, the account could be classified as a stressed asset later, experts said, requiring high provisioning. But more clarification on this would be required, they said. Bankers said considering most accounts under restructuring have defaulted in the past, the new framework would force these accounts to the resolution path. However, the loans would have to re-rated again. This could be bad for the promoters because...

Lead by PSBs, NPAs soar 34.5% in Q3; pain to linger on, claims report Public sector banks had a weaker performance on various indicators, including the key parameter of NPAs and also profitability, according to the agency The issue of impaired assets may be far from over for the banking system as gross non- performing assets have grown by 34.5 per cent in the December quarter, says a report. Even as bankers guide towards a better position with regard to bad loans, rating agency Care has said the issue of impaired assets is not yet over, including on recognition and accretion of loans into the dud assets category. In the report based on the performances of 30 lenders, including 17 private sector banks and 13 state-run ones, the agency said the quantum of gross NPAs moved up to 9.45 per cent as of December from 8.34 per cent a year ago. While private sector banks' bad loans ratio was maintained broadly at 4.1 per cent, their state-run counterparts registered a spike in the pr...

IT Raid Cases Not to be Processed Under E-assessment: CBDT The soon-to-be rolled out pan India e-assessment system for scrutiny cases of taxpayers will not be applicable to instances where a raid has been conducted against an assessee by the Income Tax (IT) department, the CBDT has said. It has added that the current system of manual assessment will continue in cases, where the books of accounts or original documents have to be examined, the taxman has to conduct a third-party investigation and where the tax officer has to examine a witness It will also be applicable to cases where the taxman has issued a show-cause notice to the assessee, "contemplating any adverse view", and cases where the taxpayer has requested for a "personal hearing" to explain the matter to the assessing officer The Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT), the policy-making body of the IT department, issued an instruction on Monday to further explain how the system would work, once ful...

PF body proposes decreasing administrative charges for employers The central board of trustees (CBT) of the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) will discuss a proposal to decrease the administrative charges for employers in a bid to boost social security coverage for the workers later this month. The EPFO has proposed to decrease the administrative charges to 0.50 per cent from 0.65 per cent of the worker’s monthly income that goes as employer’s share. This is the third year in a row that the EPFO has proposed decreasing the administrative charges for employers. “It is recommended that the administrative charges may further be reduced to 0.50 per cent of pay to ensure that the benefits of efficiency and savings are passed on to employers. The reduced liability on establishment can provide incentive to the employers to extend social security coverage to more employees or workers,” the agenda item of the CBT meeting, to be held on February 21, said. The EPFO meets the e...

‘Revised RBI norms to clean up NPAs in one go’ Expressing the government’s firm commitment to deal with the problem of non-performing assets (NPAs), Financial Services Secretary Rajiv Kumar on Tuesday said the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI’s) revised guidelines would help clean up the bad loan mess in one go within a strict timeframe. “It is a wake up call to defaulters. Government is determined to clean up things in one go and not defer it. Resolution now will happen within a timeframe,” he said. Resolution Now Will Happen  Within a Timeframe The revised framework has specified norms for “early identification” of stressed assets, timelines for implementation of resolution plans, and a penalty on banks for failing to adhere to the prescribed timelines.The latest notification issued by the RBI on Monday has also withdrawn the existing mechanism. The Joint Lenders’ Forum as an institutional mechanism for resolution of stressed accounts also stands discontinued, it said, ad...

Sebi to meet rating agencies on faster access to default data Capital market regulator Sebi will meet credit rating agencies this week to explore ways to have quicker access to information on loan defaults by corporates. With the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) having so far refused to share the sensitive information beyond the banking industry, Sebi is keen that all rating agencies take membership of credit information companies (CICs) to obtain default data that banks have to report to CICs. Many corporates as well as banks are reluctant to share default information with rating agencies. The only agency that receives the data on a daily basis is Central Repository of Information on Large Credit (CRILC), a RBI controlled entity, which only gives banks (but not other lenders and market participants like NBFCs) access to the data. Compared to this, CICs typically come to know about defaults after a month or a fortnight."The regulator may discuss ways to improve the quality of d...