Categoría: Technology

Airbus has landed its biggest ever order after securing a deal with Indian budget airline IndiGo to sell 250 of its A320neo jets.
Worth $26.6bn (£17bn) at list prices, the deal is the largest number of aircraft bought in a single order for the pan-European aerospace company.
However, it is unlikely that IndiGo will pay as much as the list price, as plane makers usually offer substantial discounts to secure major contracts.
The order guarantees work for Airbus’ thousands of staff at its UK plant in Broughton, North Wales, which produces the wings for all of the company’s passenger jets. At current production rates, Airbus has almost a decade’s worth of work on its order books.

The Airbus A320neo – which stands for “new engine option” – is a modified version of its bestselling A320 workhorse airliner, and seats about 190 passengers. Almost 12,000 aircraft in the A320 family have been ordered.

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/transport/11807108/Airbus-lands-biggest-single-order-for-airliners-with-IndiGo-deal.html

Snapdeal is believed to have raised US$500 million from a group of foreign investors, including China’s Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, SoftBank Group and Foxconn, valuing the company at more than US$5 billion.

Snapdeal in October secured a US$627 million investment from SoftBank.

SoftBank aims to invest ~US$10 billion in India’s e-commerce market after it bought a stake in Snapdeal in October 2014.

India is emerging as one of the leading e-commerce markets in the world with mobile phone dominating online sales.

Recently, Snapdeal rival Flipkart raised US$700 million from its existing investors, including Steadview Capital valuing the company at US$15 billion. So far, Flipkart has raised US$3.4 billion.

Amazon’s recently announced its commitment towards India by reportedly promising a US$5 billion investment in the country. This is over and above the US$2 billion the US online giant had committed last year.

Source: http://www.indiainfoline.com/article/news-top-story/snapdeal-raises-us-500mn-from-alibaba-softbank-foxconn-report-115080400446_1.html

Chinese smartphone major Xiaomi has launched its first locally manufactured product, in partnership with Taiwan’s Foxconn Technology Group, opening another chapter in the country’s Make in India story. The smartphones are being made at its factory in Sri City, Andhra Pradesh. The Chinese firm, which started operations in India last year, manufactures devices in China and Brazil.

“This is our second local manufacturing unit outside of China, the first one being in Brazil with Foxconn. We started our discussions with the government in February and we have already started with the manufacturing,” Hugo Barra, vice-president, Xiaomi Global, said. “Manufacturing smartphones locally is a significant step towards incorporating Xiaomi into the fabric of India in the years to come. After taking into consideration several factors, manufacturing in Andhra Pradesh was an obvious choice for us,”’ he said.

However, he declined to share details about the investment, capacity or number of employees at the facility. He said Xiaomi has sold 3 million devices in the country since the company started its operations in India.

Last year, the company had announced that it had sold 1 million devices in the five months to December.

Andhra Pradesh chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu released the first Redmi 2 Prime, an enhanced version of Redmi 2, at a price of Rs 6,999 across Xiaomi’s partner sites such as Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal starting August 10. Foxconn’s India unit initially started assembly of Redmi 2 Prime and it will gradually include other devices from the company’s portfolio.

Xiaomi is the third largest smartphone maker in the world. Xiaomi became the largest smartphone vendor in China in 2014 and at the end of December 2014, it was valued at a staggering $46 billion.

For Foxconn Technology Group, the world’s biggest contract manufacturer, this is its second leg of manufacturing in India. It will produce 10,000 phones a day for Xiaomi.

“We started looking at options for local manufacturing as soon as Xiaomi entered India in July last year. Local manufacturing shows Xiaomi’s commitment to being in India for the long haul, and we are also able to contribute to generating more jobs in India,” Manu Jain, head of India operations, Xiaomi, said.

Meanwhile, Foxconn is still in talks with a few other state governments including the Telangana government to build 10-12 factories over the next five years at an investment of $2 billion as part of the government’s Make in India initiative. The company had to down shutters at three units in Tamil Nadu after client Nokia was sold to Microsoft.

Hon Hai Precision Industry, as it is formally known, boasts a clientele that includes Apple, Cisco, Dell, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard, among others.

Source: http://www.financialexpress.com/article/industry/companies/xiaomi-foxconn-tie-up-to-make-phones-in-india/117136/

Uber is going to open its impressive war chest in Asia’s third largest economy.

On July 30, the San Francisco-headquartered taxi-hailing app announced that it will invest a staggering $1 billion (Rs 6,400 crore) to scale up operations in India, one of the company’s fastest growing markets globally. Uber wants to clock one million trips daily by 2016 in India, five times its current 200,000, and take on its homegrown rival Ola, which operates four times as many rides daily.

“We are extremely bullish on the Indian market and see tremendous potential here,” Amit Jain, president of Uber India, said in a statement.

Much of the funds will be used to improve operations, expand into new cities, and develop new products and payment solutions, the statement said. The investment – the first of its kind from Uber in India – comes nearly two years after the $50 billion startup set up its business in the country.

Source: http://scroll.in/article/745568/watch-out-ola-uber-is-spending-1-billion-on-its-india-operations

General Motors Co (GM.N) said on Wednesday it will invest $1 billion over the next few years to turn India into a global export hub, even as it cuts production capacity in the country due to sluggish demand.

The Detroit carmaker, which has the capacity to produce more than 280,000 cars a year in India, will reduce this to 220,000 a year by 2025 as it stops making cars at one plant and modestly raises capacity at its second plant in the country.

«We need to have that kind of consolidation and rationalization to make sure we are here for the long term, that we have a sustainable business,» CEO Mary Barra told reporters in New Delhi.

India’s automobile market has been sluggish for the past few years, with annual sales of less than 3 million cars. But by 2020 analysts expect India to become the world’s third-largest passenger vehicle market after China and the United States.

Even after two decades in India, GM’s sales are falling and it is still losing money. GM lost 38.5 billion rupees ($604 million) in India in the year to March, a company filing with the corporate affairs ministry showed.

GM is confident of building a profitable business in India, Barra said, but did not give a timeline.

Western carmakers such as GM, Volkswagen AG (VOWG_p.DE) and Ford Motor Co (F.N) have struggled to increase sales in India, which is dominated by Japanese and Korean auto makers such as Suzuki Motor Corp (7269.T) and Hyundai Motor Co (005380.KS) that have a strong portfolio of low-priced, compact cars.

The recent Indian economic slowdown has left Western carmakers with excess production capacity.

This has prompted some carmakers such as Ford and Volkswagen to boost exports from India to use their capacity and benefit from low labor costs and economies of scale, while at the same time working to increase domestic sales.

GM India’s investment is part of its plan to invest $5 billion over several years to develop a global family of Chevrolet vehicles with Shanghai Automotive Industry Corp (SAIC), the state-owned Chinese automaker.

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/07/29/us-gm-india-investment-idUSKCN0Q30XA20150729