UPS Financial News

US-based Forbes Global Properties on Wednesday announced its entry into the Indian real estate market with the launch of India Forbes Global Properties, and claims to set a global benchmark of luxurious living in India. In the initial stage, the company plans to build two projects – one in Mumbai and another in Delhi — and will offer brokerage and financial services, among others.

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Agratas, Tata Group’s global battery business, and Tata Technologies, an engineering and digital services company have announced their collaboration to scale Agratas’ product development and enterprise systems, supporting the design, development and manufacturing of best-in-class battery solutions.

The real estate sector, buoyed by a remarkable year, has again started looking towards the upcoming Interim Budget 2024-2025 with a blend of hope and expectations. The previous year, as detailed in various reports, was a milestone for residential real estate, witnessing an upsurge in both new launches and home sales. This success story has set the stage for what many in the industry hope will be a transformative period of policy reform.

Gurugram, one of the most significant cities amongst top metro cities, has become a focal point for Grade A office spaces, with a unique catalyst driving this surge—Global Capability Centers (GCCs) that global companies set up offshore to access specialized high-skill talent to ensure sustainable business growth. These GCCs, synonymous with innovation and research and development (R&D), are transforming India’s economic orientation.

Question: I am an individual taxpayer and have made certain donations during the year. Kindly guide me on the aspects to be considered for claiming deduction w.r.t. such donations in the Income Tax Return.

taxpayers around the country are eagerly awaiting Feb 1 when Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will present the last (interim) Budget before the 2024 general elections. Taxpayers’ expectations include slashing of tax rate, rollout of tax exemptions and slashing of TDS (tax deducted on source) on virtual digital assets (VDA), among others. Before listing out more expectations, it is vital to first decode some key terms for the lay taxpayer to understand.

High Net Worth Individuals (UHNIs). Acting as back offices, they cater to families and individuals with investible corpus over ₹5 crores, either as single-family offices for a specific family or as multi-family offices serving multiple families. First-generation entrepreneurs and top management professionals are now turning to family offices for wealth management.

Federal Reserve’s policy rate, plotted as a thick line against time on the x-axis. Branching out from this trunk are hairs: fainter lines showing the future path for interest rates that the market, in aggregate, expects at each moment in time. The chart leaves you with two thoughts.

Oscar nominations rarely make anyone sit up the way this year’s have. Was it a classic preference for serious cinema or an old gender bias that swayed Hollywood’s Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences? Of last summer’s two most hotly raved-about movies, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, the award contenders picked for 2024 display a clear tilt towards the biopic of a scientist credited with the world’s first nuclear weapon. It was nominated this week for awards in 13 categories, including for Best Picture and Best Director, the two big ones, while the feminist remake of an iconic doll’s legend got eight call-outs, with Gerwig left out of the contest as an award-worthy director.

US Federal Reserve should start cutting interest rates soon, says Bill Gross In the beginning of 2023, the US was widely tipped to fall into a recession as the Federal Reserve jacked up interest rates to combat an inflation scourge not seen in decades. On the other hand, China was expected to experience a rip-roaring recovery as it reopened its economy fully to commerce after the Covid-19 lockdown. Mint Explainer | How China fumbled the bag with its economy post-Covid However, this week's GDP data showed that the US economy ended the year with a bang, growing 3.3% in real, inflation-adjusted terms in the fourth quarter after expanding 4.9% in the third.

Aditya Verma, a British-Indian student, can hardly be faulted for thinking two F-18s flanking his flight to Menorca in Spain were holding an exercise in the wake of the Russia-Ukraine war. But then, maybe he can be.

RBI has allowed LIC to acquire an additional 4.8% stake in HDFC Bank, raising its total stake to 9.99% by January 24, 2025. LIC owned a 5.19% stake in HDFC Bank as of December 2023. HDFC Bank, in a notification to stock exchanges on Thursday, said LIC has received approval from the RBI to acquire up to 9.99% in the bank by January 25, 2025.

Elon Musk warned sales growth would slow this year despite price cuts that have already hurt margins at the world's most valuable automaker and fueled investor concerns about soft demand and Chinese competition. Musk said on Wednesday that growth would be «notably lower» as Tesla focuses on a cheaper, next-generation electric vehicle to be made at its Texas factory in the second half of 2025, which is expected to spark the next boom in deliveries. But he said ramping up production of the new model would be challenging because it would involve cutting-edge technologies. Tesla's stock suffered its sharpest intraday percentage loss in more than a year, with $80 billion in market value wiped out on Thursday. That pushed its market capitalization loss for the month to about $210 billion. «The Tesla headlines have essentially gone from bad to worse,» said TD Cowen analysts, noting that the fourth-quarter revenue and profit were also below expectations. Shares of other EV makers also fell, with Rivian Automotive Inc, Lucid Group and Fisker down between 4.7% and 8.8%. The EV industry has been grappling with a slowdown in demand for more than a year and the price cuts by Tesla will likely worsen the pressure on the startups and automakers such as Ford . «The problem for Tesla is any significant attempt to boost sales from here on will probably need to be achieved at the cost of further falls in operating margin, due to having to compete with BYD in China, as well as increased competition elsewhere,» said Michael Hewson, chief market analyst at CMC Markets. At least nine brokerages downgraded the stock, while seven raised their ratings.

Mississippi, its latest capacity expansion amid growing demand for cloud services as more firms adopt new artificial intelligence technologies. Businesses are doubling down on AI development and majority of that traffic is expected to be managed on the cloud infrastructure from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud and Microsoft's Azure — the top three vendors globally.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is visiting South Korea on Friday and meeting leaders of chipmakers Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, two sources with knowledge of the matter said. Altman is expected to discuss potential partnerships for making chips, the sources said, declining to be identified.

Intel on Thursday forecast revenue for the first quarter that could miss market estimates by more than $2 billion, as it grapples with uncertain demand for its chips used in the traditional server and personal computer markets. Shares fell 10% in after-hours trading, setting the stock up for a roughly $20 billion fall in market value on Friday if the losses held. Intel stock gained 66% in the past year, as the PHLX Semiconductor Index rose 53%. In an interview, Chief Executive Officer Pat Gelsinger said that the company's core businesses of PCs and servers were hitting seasonal low demand at the same time as noncore businesses such as auto chip firm Mobileye.

MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan held broadly steady and was on track for a weekly gain of 2%. Trading was thinned with Australia out on a holiday. Chinese stocks looked set to end the week on a strong footing as a wave of policy support from Beijing restored fragile investor confidence and put a floor under its sliding stock market. The blue-chip index rose 0.03% and was eyeing a 2% weekly gain, while the Shanghai Composite edged 0.3% higher, putting it on track for a 3% weekly rise, its largest since July 2023. Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index eased 0.41%, but was still more than 5% higher for the week, also its best performance since last July. In an attempt to shore up its fragile economic recovery, China's central bank announced a deep cut to bank reserves on Wednesday, in a move that will inject about $140 billion of cash into the banking system. Those came a day after Bloomberg News reported Chinese authorities are seeking to mobilise about 2 trillion yuan ($278.98 billion), mainly from the offshore accounts of Chinese state-owned enterprises, as part of a stabilisation fund to buy shares. «We remain cautious on China, in line with our view for several years,» said John Pinkel, a partner and portfolio manager at Indus Capital. «We see evidence of selling induced by structured 'snowball' products, especially from onshore China sources.

South Korea's SK Hynix Inc., the world's second-largest memory chipmaker, announced a return to profitability in the fourth quarter of 2023. The company recorded an operating profit of 346 billion won ($259.8 million), significantly outperforming market expectations of a 192 billion won operating loss. This marks a stark contrast to the 1.9 trillion won loss reported in the same quarter a year earlier. The profit is attributed to a surge in revenue by 47%, driven by strong demand for AI-focused memory chips.

Mint reported. If it turns out to be true, it will be higher than the expected growth of 8.9% in the current financial year, as per the first advance estimates. While the Budget had assumed 10.5% growth rate for 2023-24, new estimates suggest a slower growth, particularly on account of low wholesale price inflation.

The highly anticipated Ethereum hard fork Dencun is gearing up for its testnet debut on Sepolia and Holesky in the upcoming weeks.