Market News

Economy
·Inflation eased to 0.18 per cent, the lowest ever in the last three decades, even as prices of food articles like pulses, cereals and vegetable hardened during the week ended April 4. The wholesale price-based index declined by 0.08 per cent against 0.26 per cent in the previous week. The decline was mainly due to higher base effect and falling prices of some manufactured products. The inflation stood at 7.71 per cent in the same wee k a year ago.
Oil & Gas
·Reliance Industries (RIL), the country's largest private company, may reopen its domestic petroleum retail outlets, as the export-oriented unit status of its first refinery at Jamnagar in Gujarat has been ended.
Telecommunication
·Reliance Communications (RCom), an Anil Ambani group company, has added around 11.3 million new subscribers in the January-March quarter, increasing its total subscriber base to 72.6 million by the March end.
·MTNL will launch its 3G services in Mumbai next month, as it targets a user base of 1,00,000 for the third generation mobile service by year-end.
Banking
·State Bank of India has agreed to lend Vodafone-Essar, the joint venture between UK's Vodafone and Essar, Rs 10,000 crore to finance the company's entry into 3G (third generation) telecom services and expansion of its broadband operations.
Automobile
·Maruti Suzuki is investing Rs 1,200 crore to replace engines of existing models with a new light-weight fuel-efficient one that will conform to a new national emission standard to come in place next year.
·Within 15 days of opening the registration process for Nano, its Rs 1 lakh car, Tata Motors has sold nearly 500,000 application forms, raking in Rs 15 crore (at Rs 300 each). Distributors associated with the Nano bookings said most of the forms were likely to translate into bookings.
Pharmaceutical
·Ranbaxy Laboratories, India's largest drug maker by sales, may be sitting on mark-to-market (MTM) losses of over Rs 2,500 crore on foreign currency derivatives transactions entered into with various banks, according to estimates by one of its lenders in February this year.
·Lupin Ltd plans to revamp its drug research programme and foray into novel biotech and reverse engineering of biotech drugs (or biosimilars). The move comes after the company's earlier development efforts failed to deliver the desired results. The foray into biotech will help it tap an emerging opportunity that is globally worth $30-40 billion.
·Polaris Software Lab, a financial technology company, is planning to strengthen its insurance portfolio business by introducing new solutions. The company is setting up a centre of excellence for insurance near Chennai with an investment of around Rs 100 crore to develop new
solutions and to service company's insurance clients.
Infrastructure
·Unitech Ltd, the country's second-biggest real estate developer, said it raised $325 million (Rs 1,625 crore) from selling new shares to qualified institutions to repay a part of its debt of over Rs 8,900 crore and strengthen capital.
·DLF, India's biggest real estate developer, is likely to pull out of its Rs 1,000 crore Infopark project in the city which was to be developed over 54 acres in an approved special economic zone for information technology projects.
Others
·In the last three months ending March 2009, the promoters' stake in GHCL, one of the leading chemical and textile companies, has declined by a whopping 20.16 percentage points to 18.16 per cent. It was 38.32 per cent at the end December 2008.