Daily News Roundup - Nov 28 2011

Reliance Industries has scrapped its plan to acquire Bharti’s stake in the life and general insurance joint ventures with French insurer AXA. (ET)

Bharti Retail, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Bharti Enterprises, has said that it will now initiate talks with Walmart for equity partnership in its front-end stores. (FE)

Essar Oil Ltd has renewed a major product sale and purchase agreement with Indian Oil Corporation Ltd. (BS)

Subex is looking to raise US$135mn to pay back foreign currency convertible bond holders and service debt. (ET)



Suzlon Energy will focus on value engineering to remain competitive and has set a target of bagging $1bn worth of new orders every quarter for the next few years. (BS)

JSW Steel reported an increase of 2% in October crude steel production at 570,000 tons over the corresponding month last year. (BS)

Tata Motors has approved to send a Nano car to National Institute of Design for its students to study it and give possible suggestions to redesign the car. (BL)

Essar Energy plc announced that the first of two 600MW units at its Salaya-I power generation project in Jamnagar district of Gujarat has been synchronised with the transmission grid. (BL)

NTPC is likely to join the coal logistics joint venture mooted by Coal India and Shipping Corporation of India. (BS)

ONGC is exploring opportunities to farm-out equity interests in its four CBM (coal-bed methane) assets including one in West Bengal and three in Jharkhand. (BL)

HDFC Bank has launched Mobile Bank accounts in association with Vodafone m-paisa. (FE)

Apollo Tyres Ltd is expecting to double the export of Apollo branded tyres to 100,000 pieces a month, to Europe, in a little over six months. (BL)

DLF expects to pare its debt burden of over Rs225bn to less than half in the next two years through sale of non-core assets. (BS)

Expecting a three-fold increase in alumina exports to about 3MTPA in the next three years, NALCO is set to revamp its port handling facility at Visakhapatnam. (BS)
Economy Snippets

The Centre has sought Parliamentary approval for gross additional expenditure of Rs631.80bn, nearly double the additional spend of Rs347.25bn it demanded in the first batch of supplementary demand for grants in August. (BL)

The coal ministry is likely to devise a separate coal block auctioning process for power projects awarded through tariff based bidding. (BS)

The Finance Ministry on approved 18 FDI proposals, including that of Dish TV and MCX, envisaging foreign investment of Rs21.26bn, while referring the application of Unitech Wireless to Cabinet. (ET)

The domestic gas output in October fell 7.4% at 4.026bn cubic meter, as the production from offshore fields, including Reliance Industries-operated KG-DG block, fell 9.8% to 3.249bn cubic metres. (BL)

The finance ministry has set specific targets on a range of financial parameters that the public sector banks have to achieve over the next four years. (BS)