Black Lives Matter: Firms pledge to add at least 1 Black director to board

More than a dozen companies are promising to add at least one Black director to their boards, as businesses across America slowly get their leadership to look more like the customers they serve.

Black Lives Matter: More than a dozen companies, including Zillow and M M LaFleur, are promising to add at least one Black director to their boards within the next year, as businesses across America slowly get their leadership to look more like the customers they serve.

The companies all made the pledge as part of the launch of an initiative by The Board Challenge, which is pushing to get more diversity into boardrooms. The Board Challenge’s co-founders will check in with each of them after six months and again at 12 months to monitor their progress, while also helping them to find candidates.

“America has been reminded again in tragic fashion that we must redouble our efforts to build a more inclusive society,” Brad Gerstner, CEO of Altimeter Capital and a co-founder of The Board Challenge, said in a statement. “Business leaders can’t let this moment pass us by without playing our part and taking this tangible step to build a more diverse boardroom.”

Companies have been making slow progress in getting people who aren’t white men into leadership positions. Across the big companies in the S&P 500 index, more than a third did not have a single Black director in 2019, according to Black Enterprise. The rate of 37 per cent was down slightly from 39 per cent a year before. In many cases, forces outside the companies are pushing for better representation in the board room and in senior executive ranks.

Capgemini COO Thierry Delaporte becomes new Wipro CEO and MD

Neemuchwala will step down as CEO on June 1 while executive chairman Rishad Premji will oversee day-to-day operations of the company until Delaporte takes over on July 6

IT services major Wipro on Friday said it has appointed Capgemini Group veteran Thierry Delaporte as its Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, effective July 6, 2020. In January this year, the company had said its CEO and Managing Director Abidali Z Neemuchwala had decided to step down from the company. Abidali Neemuchwala will relinquish his position as CEO and MD on June 1.

Rishad Premji will oversee the day-to-day operations of the company until July 5, Wipro said in a statement. “Until recently, Thierry Delaporte was the Chief Operating Officer of Capgemini Group and a member of its group executive board. During his 25 year career with Capgemini, he held several leadership roles,” it said. He also oversaw Capgemini’s India operations, and led the group’s transformation agenda, conceptualising and driving several strategic programs across various business units, it added.

“Thierry has an exceptional leadership track record, strong international exposure, deep strategic expertise, a unique ability to forge long-standing client relationships, and proven experience of driving transformation and managing technological disruption. We believe that Thierry is the right person to lead Wipro in its next phase of growth,” Rishad Premji, Chairman of Wipro, said.

Delaporte will be based in Paris and will report to Rishad Premji. “I look forward to working closely with Rishad, the board, senior leadership and the hugely talented employees of Wipro to turn a new chapter of growth and build a better tomorrow for all our stakeholders,” Delaporte said…Read More

What can India expect from Satya Nadella’s visit as Donald Trump arrives

Microsoft launched its India operations in 1990 and for the past 30 years the company has played a major role in digital transformation of the country

With Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella all set to visit India next week — around the same time US President Donald Trump is making his first official visit to this part of the world — the software giant is looking forward to further consolidate its position in the country.

At a time when the Indian government is focused on digital transformation across sectors and modernise its IT infrastructure, Microsoft may take Satya Nadella‘s visit as an opportunity to showcase how it can help government achieve its goals across Cloud, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), smart cities, industrial automation and robotics etc.

“Government engagement is a major focus for Microsoft top management in India for the past two decades, and all the more now with expanding digital plans and also rising nationalist resistance to global digital and tech companies,” leading tech policy and media consultant Prasanto K. Roy told IANS.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has on several occasions stressed on the importance of leveraging emerging technologies like AI and ML to solve India’s critical problems.

The National Crime Records Bureau of the Ministry of Home Affairs, for example, is inviting bids from tech companies to build hardware and software infrastructure that can help the country fight crime with automated facial recognition system.

Rs 177-cr GST fraud: Man arrested in Gujarat for issuing fake tax invoices

The accused allegedly obtained GST registration, GST identity cards, login-password, SIM cards, bank accounts and online passwords in the name of dummy owners

Current Affairs: A man has been arrested for allegedly issuing fake invoices to claim Rs 177.64-crore input tax credit, the Central GST department said Saturday. The man, identified as Ehsas Ali Saiyad, a resident of Vadodara, was the mastermind of a scam involving issuing of fake invoices, said the office of the Central GST and Central Excise Commissionerate in a release in Gandhinagar.The 29-year-old allegedly floated 66 fake companies with as many dummy owners in whose name he issued tax invoices to claim input tax credit (ITC), it said.

The accused obtained GST registration, GST identity cards, login-password, SIM cards, bank accounts and online passwords in the name of these dummy owners, said the commissionerate. “The accused would issue fake bills in the name of the entities created by him. He issued tax invoice of taxable value of Rs 1,210 crore to claim input tax credit of Rs 177.64 crore,” it said.

He was arrested under provisions of the CGST Act and further investigation was on, said the release.Under Goods and Services Tax, input credit is the tax benefit manufacturers get for the GST they pay on purchase of goods. Unscrupulous elements use fake bills to claim higher ITC.

Contain Source by Business Standard or BS

Why Walmart's Flipkart acquisition is its admission of defeat in India

This deal isn't a sign that India is leapfrogging past big-box stores to some digital retail utopia

 

Walmart Inc. might want to portray its $16 billion purchase of India's largest e-commerce firm, Flipkart Group, as a brilliant strategic move, long-planned in secret, that would allow the U.S. retail giant to manage the transition away from big-box stores globally. Yet, the truth is that the deal represents a second-best outcome -- if that -- for Walmart as well as for Indian consumers and farmers.'

In the 11 years that Walmart has operated in India, it’s signally failed to build up its own business. That’s not entirely the company’s fault. In fact, it’s a reminder that India remains, in some ways, as inhospitable to foreign businesses as the People's Republic of China.

For over a decade, successive Indian governments have denied permission to Walmart -- and peers such as Carrefour SA -- to open up their own stores. Foreign investors can enter into partnerships with local retailers -- Walmart had one with Bharti Enterprises Pvt. Ltd. -- but they can't control the consumer-facing end of the business, and their supply chains are subject to fearsome additional regulations. When foreign investment in supermarkets was finally permitted in 2012, for example, the previous government required any major, foreign-backed outlets to source 30 percent of the processed or manufactured goods they sold -- by value -- from tiny Indian enterprises worth less than $1 million apiece. The government also blocked companies such as Walmart from expanding into small-town India, restricting them to cities with populations over 1 million people.

It's no coincidence that Walmart closed its deal with Flipkart now. Its joint venture with Bharti went bad a few years ago. And, in January, the possibility of having its own stores seemed finally to have closed, after the government made it marginally easier for single-brand retailers such as Ikea Group to open up stores in India but left restrictions on multi-brand retailers untouched. Even the relatively investment-friendly administration of Prime Minister Narendra Modi appears to be afraid of Walmart, possibly because the strongest political support for Modi's party has always come from small shopkeepers. Clearly, the company needed another strategy.

Walmart would’ve struggled to open its own e-commerce business as well, given that India doesn't permit foreign investment in online retailing. All you can set up are "marketplaces.” So Amazon India can't hold any of its own stock, and Indians can't buy directly from Amazon. Instead, Amazon works in India like eBay, serving as a clearinghouse for other people's goods; it’s forbidden from holding any inventory of its own. It can't even provide easy refunds.

Click Here :  Walmart Flipkart Deal 

The Stayzilla saga: Here's how the start-up evolved then shut down

Stayzilla shut its business after it failed to keep up with rising competition

 

Stayzilla, an alternate stay aggregator shut its business after it failed to keep up with rising competition from MakeMyTrip and GoIbibo. It was once refered as one of the successful companies which has emerged from Chennai.

Here is a look at how the company evolved:

In July 2005, they launched Inasra Technologies to work on business model in the sector with the help of technology. While it was able to scale up to over 200 cities in a few years, the challenges were to ensure that the customers are guaranteed to get the room at the hotel, even though the booking has been confirmed through the technology platform and the growing competition in the travel booking space. It stopped service for a short while to improve its services, but the challenges continued.

In 2010, Inasra.com was rebranded as Stayzilla, as the company wanted to provide alternate stay in all "zillas" (districts) of the country. The market size then was $7-8 billion, but the segment was highly fragmented.

In March, 2012, the company raised a seed funding of $500,000 from Indian Angel Network. The funds were expected to be used for marketing. The company then had around 4,000 hotels listed in its platform in across 600 cities. The fund-raising was expected to help it to expand in more cities and for an aggressive growth.

 

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