Tata Tea scouts global buys

Tata Tea, the world’s second-largest tea company after FMCG giant Unilever with FY09 revenues of Rs 4,874 crore, on Thursday said it wants to acquire global brands in Russia, South America, Asia Pacific and Africa. These proposed acquisitions are part of Tata Tea’s new thrust on attaining global leadership in beverages.

Tata Tea is planning to operationally integrate five areas of its business—products & categories, brands, distribution, people, and processes—under an overarching management team of six people: Tetley CEO Peter Unsworth, Tata Tea MD Percy Siganporia, Tata Tea CFO L Krishnakumar, Tata Coffee MD Hamid Ashraff, Tata Tea HR head Nalin Miglani, and Tetley head of brands and marketing John Nicholas.

Branded tea contributes around 86% to Tata Tea’s consolidated worldwide turnover, with the remaining coming from bulk tea, coffee, and investment income. Two-thirds of Tata Tea’s revenues accrue from international markets.

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Satyam unveils results

Barely days before Tech Mahindra’s open offer for an additional 20% stake, Satyam Computer Services made public the unaudited financial details that it had shared with bidders earlier. In a filing with exchanges, Satyam said soon after founder B Ramalinga Raju confessed to perpetrating a Rs 7,000-crore fraud in early January, the company lost about $183 million in contracts from 56 clients up to March 26.

However, Satyam says it received new business orders from 215 mostly existing customers with contract values totalling $380 million during the same period. The company had a bank balance of Rs 373 crore at the end of March 2009, but outstanding bank loans worth Rs 469 crore.

In the quarter ended December 31, 2008, the company had a PAT of Rs 181 crore on revenues of Rs 2,206 crore. Figures for the same period the previous year were not available for comparison. In January, Satyam had a PAT of Rs 4 crore on revenues of Rs 647 crore, and for February, it had a PAT of Rs 52 crore on revenues of Rs 637 crore.

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Multiplexes, producers agree on formula, first show June 12

The two-month-old row between producers and multiplex owners over revenue sharing has ended, paving the way for a slew of releases from June 12. Both sides had met several times over the last month, but ultimately thrashed out their differences at a marathon 14-hour session at Yash Raj Studios on Thursday. The deal—BIG Cinemas was first to sign on the dotted line—was sealed at 3.30 am.

“Both sides have agreed to the deal,” said Reliance BIG Entertainment chairman Amit Khanna. However, other exhibitors such as PVR, Fame, Inox and Cinemax are yet to ink the agreement, said Kishore Lulla, CEO of Eros International, one of the industry’s largest producers and distributors. According to sources, they are expected to sign on Monday.

Under the terms agreed, producers and exhibitors will now share 50% of the box-office revenues in week one, then 42.5%, 37.5% and 30% in subsequent weeks.

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Revenue sharing row keeps IPL matches off big screen

The chances of enjoying IPL matches on 75 mm screen is almost ruled out after Multi Screen Media Pvt Ltd (the new name of Sony Entertainment) and the major multiplex players couldn't settle the revenue sharing arrangement. The talks fell flat when Sony refused to grant telecast rights to multiplexes for anything less than 60% of the revenue earned through screening of IPL matches, according to industry sources.

In earlier stages, Sony had insisted on charging the multiplexes around 65 to 70% of the revenue, which the industry players found difficult to concede. Additionally, the multiplex owners would have had to pay a tax on a full house for showing the event. "Such is the tax structure, that in case of category of special event sunder which the IPL format falls, we have to pay taxes for a full house even if only five people turn up. After sharing 60% of revenue with Sony and paying a tax to government for full occupancy, what would we be left with?" said a source.

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Vodafone may enter MTN race

The bidding war for South African telecom major MTN may have just started, with the largest telecom company by revenues, Vodafone, too eyeing MTN. According to foreign media reports, the company is examining a £20 billion ($39.02 billion) bid for MTN.

However, a Vodafone spokesperson told a foreign news agency in London that, “we have no intention of pursuing a bid for MTN.” Vodafone is the second largest mobile operator with about 250 million subscribers worldwide and acquisition of MTN would add the latter’s 68 million users to its fold, taking it closer to China Mobile, which is the world’s largest mobile company by subscriber base close to 400 million.

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Flying high in testing times

In the aviation industry, characterised by intense competition and high cost structures, streamlining every aspect of operations to bring in efficiencies is a high priority. Improving management's visibility to operational and business performance is imperative to achieve this. It was this objective that drove Jet Airways to conduct a business process reengineering exercise and reimplement core backend modules of SAP and extend its footprint simultaneously. Jet Airways caters to both domestic and international routes.

The main challenge lay in improving business visibility and reducing delays in MIS. Project E3 (it stands for efficiency, empowerment and effectiveness) was executed to deliver information regarding the performance of all routes/flights flown by the airline taking into account the revenues and various costs incurred to the top management. It works by intricately integrating critical information into data models from various core modules of SAP and an in-house developed module for cost and revenue accounting system.

Jet Airways has an in house applications module for revenue accounting system and costing developed using FoxPro, which was outside the SAP environment. Related reports or MIS had to be manually fed into the SAP systems, which was integrated with FICO and Business Warehouse (BW) to generate MIS reports. RN Moorthy, senior general manager (IT), Jet Airways says, "We had to cull out the data from our legacy applications, feed it into R/3 and do budgeting to produce MIS reports. There was a lot of time delay in reconciling the data from disparate systems and it was error prone as it required manual intervention." He adds, "The delay could be anywhere between a week to ten days after the closure of the week. Our people had to burn midnight oil to dig into the reports; it was taxing on our bottom line."

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