- Arvind's Newsletter
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- Arvind's Newsletter
1.Masdar, Gentari, Others Eye Ayana
About half a dozen investors, including Abu Dhabi’s Masdar Clean Energy, Petronas-owned Gentari, Singapore’s Sembcorp, PSP Investments and Brookfield, are vying to acquire Ayana Renewable Power, a clean energy platform owned by the National Investment and Infrastructure Fund (NIIF).
The majority stake sale will value Ayana’s equity at $1 billion, with an enterprise value — inclusive of debt in the capital structure — around $2.5-3 billion, sources told ET. Non-binding bids will likely be in by mid-April, said these officials.
The NIIF owns Ayana with 51% stake, while British International Investment (formerly CDC Group) holds 32% and Eversource Capital-managed Green Growth Equity Fund (GGEF) holds 17%.
2.Chennai startup finds a solution for ‘overqualified housewives’. No more motherhood penalty
“According to the US-based National Bureau of Economic Research, on average, a quarter of women in the world will drop out of the workforce within a year of the birth of their first child as a result of the motherhood penalty.”
Now a tech professional from Chennai, 30 year old Sankari, has used this issue to launch a start-up which solves this problem (at least in part) for female professionals. Nootan Sharma’s article in The Print says “After working in the IT sector for eight years, Sankari took a career break to take care of her baby. But a little over a year later, when she was ready to return to the workforce, there was no place for her. She was passed over as just another ‘housewife’.
“I am an MIT [Madras Institute of Technology] graduate in computer science engineering, and I was getting job offers for data entry. I was at the peak of my career in the IT sector before conceiving my baby. Why would I settle for less?” said the 30-year-old, outrage and anger seeping into her otherwise soft-spoken demeanour.
Unwilling to accept the penalty of motherhood, Sankari tapped into her network, used her IT skills, and launched her own job portal, Overqualified Housewives. That was in August 2021. Since then, she has hired five employees, upskilled more than 2,500 women, and helped more than 500 women get jobs in the IT, healthcare and other sectors. Work from home, freelance gigs, and one-time payments are prioritised on her portal, “which promises to act as a catalyst in giving women their power back”…
Today, Sankari says she has tied up with 600 businesses in cities like Chennai and Bengaluru and even in the US and Germany. When she started out, she began with finding HR, admin and data entry jobs. “But now we have expanded to 25 options that include IT, content writing, real estate and hospitality, among others,” said Sankari, who launched her business with no outside investment.
Most of the women she’s placed earn a monthly salary in the range of Rs. 18,000 to 60,000 depending on skill level and position.
3.India has little time to lose as new land routes in Central Asia, Iran spring up as trade links, opines Vivek Y Kelkar in MoneyControl.
The Houthis have greatly upped the risk of the Red Sea route. But there are changes afoot with new fast-developing land corridors that allow trade to circumvent these risks, with the advantage of lower transit times.
Geopolitics is driving, and will drive, much of the dynamic of these trade routes, several of these initiated shrewdly by China as part of their Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). One of these, the so-called Middle Corridor, or the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route (TITR) has quietly been gaining much of the trade that used to traditionally go through the Red Sea. Coupled with the fast-developing International North South Corridor from Russia’s north to Iranian ports, these trade routes could well change some of the geopolitical alliances that drive Asia, negating many a US advantage in the region.
Together with their fast-developing spur lines, these land-based, predominantly rail routes not just offer advantages for Central Asia, but considerably enhance the geopolitical and geo-economic returns for Russia, Iran, and China. There are still some sections to be completed and much political wrangling will occur since its Iran, China and Russia that are inextricably entwined here, but the promise the route holds is definite. India, too, stands to gain much from the effective exploitation of the corridor with the links into Central Asia and Eastern Europe, via a routing through Iran’s Chahbahar port.
The TITR Association’s members include Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Turkey, Ukraine, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Singapore, and China. The route comprises 4,250 kilometres of railway lines and just over 500 kilometres of sea corridors.
In the first 10 months of 2023, 2.26 billion tons of cargo traversed the route, surging 88 percent over the previous year. The corridor has a current total throughput capacity of 5.8 million tons of cargo annually and plans are afoot to increase capacity to 10 million tons by 2030.
4.THE 6 QUALITIES OF GREAT STRATEGIC THINKERS
What is strategic thinking exactly? Are we born with it, or can we nurture it? In this book, Prof. Michal Watkins explores what constitutes a strategic mindset and how leaders should develop it.
Michael D. Watkins is a professor of leadership and organizational change at the IMD Business School and a cofounder of Genesis Advisers. Previously, he was a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and the Harvard Business School and an affiliate faculty member at the Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation.Below, Michael shares five key insights from his new book, The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking: Leading Your Organization into the Future.
5.CATL, the little-known Chinese battery maker that has the US worried
The world’s two superpowers are so intricately linked that it’s hard to think of a pillar of the economy that hasn’t been strained by tensions between the US and China. And the next frontline in the economic conflict may be the most fundamental yet: a fight for power itself.
A Chinese company that most people have never heard of is at the heart of the global race to store the clean energy needed to power the green transition in the US and the rest of the world.
China’s Contemporary Amperex Technology Co Limited, or CATL, is an energy storage specialist that is the world’s largest battery maker for electric vehicles (EVs). But despite the fact that the company controls nearly two-fifths of the world’s EV battery market – and has powered cars made by brands including Tesla, Volkswagen and BMW – it has long flown under the radar of US politics
6.Deloitte launches biggest reorganisation in a decade to cut costs
Deloitte has launched the biggest overhaul of its global operations in a decade as the Big Four firm seeks to cut costs and reduce the organisation’s complexity in the face of an expected market slowdown.
Under the plan, Deloitte’s main business units will be cut to four — audit and assurance; strategy, risk and transactions; technology and transformation; and tax and legal — from the five the firm has had since 2014. The reorganisation will reduce costs across the firm, said one person familiar with the plan, but added that a figure had not yet been put on the savings.
Deloitte’s global chief executive Joe Ucuzoglu is spearheading the shake-up that will take a year to implement across the more than 150 countries the firm operates in.
Deloitte’s global revenues increased 15 per cent to $65bn in its last financial year, cementing its position as the largest of the Big Four. But after several years of rapid growth, Deloitte, EY, PwC and KPMG are braced for a tougher 12 months as a difficult economic backdrop in key markets prompts companies to cut spending. The UK consulting market will fail to grow this year for the first time since 2020, according to a new report, which includes input from the Big Four.
Deloitte’s consulting, financial advisory and risk advisory divisions will be brought into two newly created business units: strategy, risk and transactions; and technology and transformation.
The former will house Deloitte’s mergers and acquisitions advisory services that has struggled amid a drought in dealmaking. The technology and transformation unit will bring together its “digital transformation” services, including engineering, artificial intelligence, data and cyber, according to the email to partners, a copy of which was seen by the Financial Times.
7.Vladimir Putin won another six-year term. The election was the least transparent in recent Russian history.
Thousands of Russian voters silently protested President Vladimir Putin during his predetermined election by showing up to the polls at the same time and forming long lines, a plan promoted by opposition leader Alexei Navalny before he died in prison. Early results showed Putin taking 87% of the vote, a foregone conclusion in a rigged election that grants him a fifth six-year term.
Experts say Putin’s reelection will likely embolden him to pursue even more aggressive tactics against Ukraine, and many Russians are especially uneasy about the possibility of another war mobilisation. Putin’s one-man grip on power is so strong that “not even the handpicked elite” have an answer for who could succeed him, Moscow-based journalist Anna Nemtsova wrote.
