Digital Financial News

Hero MotoCorp, the world’s largest two-wheeler manufacturer, will report its financial results for the quarter ended September 2023 today. The company is expected to see double digit growth in net profit, while revenue is seen rising moderately. Despite strong urban demand and adequate finance availability, volume performance of two-wheeler companies in Q2FY24 has been restricted due to the timing of the festive season.

Barely a week after the government declared the Bharat National Cyber Security Exercise 2023 a grand success, personal data of 815 million Indians, including Aadhaar numbers, phone numbers and addresses, started being hawked on the black web. Cybersecurity is different from other areas such as, say, tourism promotion: mere enthusiasm isn’t sufficient. What’s needed is an effective strategy, policy, regulation, technical standards, enforcement agencies, continuous training, user vigilance, and investment in quality education.

Tata Steel Q2 Results Preview: Tata Steel will announce its financial results for the second quarter of FY24 today, November 1. The Tata group company is expected to report a sharp fall in profitability during the July-September quarter of FY24. The overall steel sector is expected to report mixed performance in Q2FY24 due to reduced seasonal demand and lower average selling price (ASP), resulting from decreased ferrous prices.

Preparations are in full swing for Karwa Chauth 2023. It is a special occasion dedicated to married women, who usually fast, from sunrise to moonrise, for the good health and longevity of their husbands. They don't drink water, eat food throughout the day, and open the fast after offering Arghaya to the Moon. Husbands can make their wives feel special by gifting them financial security this Karwa Chauth.

Southeast Asia's internet economy is expected to grow 11% year-on-year in 2023, slowing from last year's 20% growth, an industry report showed on Wednesday. The annual report published jointly by Alphabet's Google, Singapore state investor Temasek Holdings and global business consultants Bain & Company, also said the region's internet economy is seen worth $295 billion by 2025, down from a previous estimate of $330 billion.

Saugata Gupta, MD & CEO, Marico, says “it was a combination of two things have happened, as far as margins are concerned. Yes, there is some raw material tailwind, there has been significant efforts which we continue to do to manage costs and obviously spend effectiveness and we have introduced a significant amount of analytics into our spend effectiveness dive. The other thing that has helped is that we have focused on two things; first is that in the food business, which we had scaled up from 2020. The other one which we worked on in a very focused manner was to improve or reduce the cash burn rate in digital brands.” The company has upped its margin guidance for FY24. What are the factors that are leading to this particular move? Where do you believe the margin improvement in FY24 could be 200 bps versus earlier guidance of 150 bps? Is that on the back of the softness in the RM cost and also how much are you confident about the sustainability of the margin levels going ahead? Our entire focus is to ensure that we maximize volume growth and market share subject to a threshold level of margins and in the past we have defined that threshold as anything between 19% and 20%. Some years, it has crossed 20% and this year we are going to deliver a number which could be one of the highest in our history.

Mark Zuckerberg’s flagship company Meta has been slowly taking over the internet. Meta now owns Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Threads, and WhatsApp, meaning that Zuckerberg almost holds a complete monopoly over our most popular online spaces. In a new move, Meta has announced chatbots with a ‘personality’, further expanding Zuckerberg’s influence over the digital realm and competing with Elon Musk.

Protean eGov Technologies IPO, formerly known as NSDL E-Governance Infrastructure has set the price band for its issue at ₹752-792 per share to raise ₹490.3 crore. The company is set to launch its three-day initial public offer on November 6 and close on November 8. Meanwhile, the anchor investors bidding for the IPO will start on 3 November.

Deal makers rifling through the racks of Australia’s fashion industry have found their next target. Street Talk understands 16 parties are trying on affordable fashion retailer Vine Apparel for size, put up for sale by FTI Consulting in August.

L&T: Larsen & Toubro reported a net profit of ₹3,222 crore in the September 2023 quarter, higher by 45% as against ₹2,229 crore reported in the year-ago period, as per the results declared by the company on October 31. The company's revenue from operations during Q2FY24 came in ₹51,024 crore, marking a jump of 19% from ₹42,762 crore reported in the corresponding quarter of the previous fiscal. Bharti Airtel: Telecom major Bharti Airtel recorded a net profit of ₹1,341 crore in the second quarter of fiscal year 2023-24 (Q2FY24), which is 37% lower than the year ago.

India's infrastructure sector closed the September quarter on a firm note, while frantic festive demand lifted automobile dispatches to yet another record in October, highlighting the twin drivers of the economy — government capital expenditure and high-end consumption. The Index of Eight Core Industries rose 8.1% in September from a year earlier, with coal, steel and electricity posting robust growth, data released on Tuesday showed.

digital payments will be led by ‘person-to-government’ payments moving away from cash. Adhering to the Digital India policy, the government-backed National Informatics Centre (NIC) is building applications which can accept payments digitally, make settlements and generate invoices — all in one go for different government departments.

post-listing experience of public market investors from some of the earlier initial public offerings of new-age companies is unlikely to have an impact on the offering of Mamaearth parent Honasa Consumer, its cofounder and chief executive said. “The numbers should showcase in the next few days. We feel like it’s going in the right direction,” Varun Alagh told ET in an interview. “The retail portion has been subscribed 35% on day 1. For whatever reason, some people would have tasted bad blood but there have been multiple IPOs where there were 70-80% listing gains,” he added.

social media conglomerate Meta on Monday said it would start offering the users of its platforms in the European Union, European Economic Area and Switzerland a 'subscription option' to keep Facebook and Instagram «ad-free». The subscription option ranges from 9.99 Euros per month for the web version to 12.99 Euros per month for the app versions. Meta said it is introducing subscription options for users to comply with the new regulations in the European Union. The company will continue offering ad-supported versions for users in these regions and use the browsing data or user data to serve them personalised items.

ICMR servers. Details, including Aadhaar number, passport number, name, age, gender and address of 4 lakh citizens, are already uploaded as sample files on the dark web by the hacker named 'pwn0001' who is auctioning the 90 GB data extracted by him from ICMR servers on October 9, claimed cyber experts. This incident which was first-discovered by American cyber firm Resecurity on October 10 could potentially be the largest data breach in Indian history.

Infosys continues to be plagued by the exodus of senior executives to rivals with Rajeev Ranjan being the latest to leave India’s second-largest software services exporter after a stint of more than 24 years. Ranjan, who was the executive vice president (EVP) and service offering head for manufacturing in India and Japan business units, left Infosys to join US-based engineering firm Ness Digital Engineering as its chief operating officer (COO).

Computer processor maker AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) reported Q3 FY2023 results beating Wall Street analysts' expectations, with revenue up 4.22% year on year to $5.8 billion. However, next quarter's revenue guidance of $6.1 billion was less impressive, coming in 4.53% below analysts' estimates. Turning to EPS, AMD made a non-GAAP profit of $0.70 per share, improving from its profit of $0.67 per share in the same quarter last year.

Institutional-focused crypto custody firm Bastion has obtained money-transmitter licenses (MTLs) in New Hampshire and Arkansas.

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried completed his grueling three-day testimony in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday.

NEW DELHI : The government is reviewing the country’s legal framework to identify gaps that financial offenders could exploit for laundering money, with possible tweaks in rules and regulations expected over the next few weeks, two people familiar with the development said. The focus is to ensure the legal system stands the scrutiny of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) recommendations. India is undergoing a peer review by the UN body, which assesses the technical compliance of its recommendations and the effectiveness of a country’s anti-money laundering and anti-terror financing framework.

Punjab National Bank (PNB), Union Bank of India and Central Bank of India are among those looking for consultants. Although banks have their internal cadres, some of these specialized roles require domain expertise that is not always readily available within the workforce. These roles include chief technology officer, chief financial officer, chief risk officer, chief digital officer, chief information security officer and chief economic adviser.