B.M. Munjal: Rough road ahead

Just when everybody thought motorcycle sales would never slow down, they have. Compared to 2.97 lakh units sold in March 2002, the number for the past month is 2.92 lakh. While the decline is small, it is nonetheless striking because, as Hero Honda's Head (Marketing) Atul Sobti puts it: ''We have never seen a decline in bikes.'' Why are mobikes losing power? The reasons, marketmen say, are many. Prices of petrol went up twice in February and March, hurting an industry that has long sold its products on the strength of fuel efficiency. A poor monsoon last year has blown holes in rural pockets, which had actually been fuelling the mobike boom. The budget did its bit by adding a 1 per cent calamity tax, which pushed up prices by Rs 250 to Rs 600 across models. Then there is the uncertainty over valued-added tax-dealers are simply refusing to stock as they wait for clarity on how it will impact them. The proverbial last straw came in the form of the Iraq war. With consumers keeping a wary eye on oil prices, purchases are being postponed.

The worst hit have been entry-level motorcycles and scooters. Not surprisingly, this segment strongly identifies itself with fuel economy. Worryingly for the marketers, the next couple of months look equally grim. ''The soonest a revival can be expected is beginning July, provided the rains are better. There is no other hope,'' says R.L. Ravichandran, Vice President (Marketing and Business Development), Bajaj Auto. That means a few more eyes will be looking skyward this quarter.

-Suveen K. Sinha

Lean Season
It's all quiet on the M&A front.

This calendar could be anything-the year globalisation retreated, or the world economy tanked-but the year of the M&A. That's what the initial scorecard from Dalal Street suggests. The first quarter of 2003 clocked just 23 M&A deals worth $734.41 million (Rs 3525.16 crore), compared to 40 deals valued at $3.66 billion (Rs 17,596 crore) in the same period last year. That's telling on the fortunes of the big deal-makers. J.M. Morgan Stanley, 2002 first quarter's numero uno, slips to No 9. But ICICI Securities moves up from the seventh position to right on top of the list. Why? "Smaller bankers managed to close a lot of the deals initiated in the latter half of 2002,'' explains Aditya Sanghi, Executive Director, Rabo India.

-Roshni Jayakar

A New Lease On Life
ERP companies are grinning from ear to ear over VAT. Here's why.

Queuing Up: Not in picture, the ERP guy

Ravi Kathuria can barely hide his grin as he says, ''vat has opened up more business opportunities for us.'' For the beleaguered ERP industry, to which Kathuria's Baan India belongs, the introduction of vat is nothing short of a new lease on life. The sweeping changes that the new taxation system will introduce in India are already the norm in most developed markets. And ERP companies like Baan and SAP have software to sell almost off-the-shelf. At the most, what's required are some modifications to suit the Indian tax framework. Says Nagaraj Bhargava, National Manager (Marketing & Alliance) SAP India: ''We have 350 customers across the country, and we are in the process of making them vat ready.''

SAP has shifted its vat solution to India and is offering it free of cost to its existing customers. Baan is providing some ERP software free of cost, but is charging for its Supply Chain Designer. To put its vat prototype in place, SAP had created a special cell with developers from its international offices. Then, it set about gathering feedback from its customers. By February 22, it had a prototype in place. After that, SAP carried out partner training programmes at HCL, Wipro, L&T Infotech, IBM and Accenture, which install SAP's software in India. Although no reliable estimates are available as to how much companies like SAP and Baan will make vat-enabling companies in India, it's safe to assume that the figure will run into several tens of crores.

-Swati Prasad

Affirmative Action
Co-op bank employees in Hyderabad set out to confront defaulters.

Protesting Prudential Bank employees: Payback time

In Hyderabad, where, on an average, a couple of urban co-operative banks go under each year, employees of such banks have hit upon a novel idea-in the interests of their continued employment, they will now go after defaulters. The 400-odd employees of Prudential Co-operative Bank-its board was recently superseded by the RBI and its managing director fired-have formed six recovery teams and are staging protests outside homes and offices of defaulters. Some 1200 of the tribe owe the bank more than Rs 220 crore; in 12 days, the employees have managed to recover Rs 8 crore. ''We will intensify our efforts if defaulters aren't positive and earnest,'' threatens George Reddy, one of the leaders of the recovery drive.

Employees of other banks are taking their cue from their brethren at Prudential: those of Vasavi Co-operative bank, another of the species that was forced to down shutters, are now engaging defaulters in a similar fashion. Whether it is the employees' show of strength, or their own inherent goodness, one doesn't know, but some defaulters are more than keen to pay up. One such is Rajeev Reddy, whose company Country Club (India) owes Prudential Rs 32 crore. Citing bad business conditions that he claims affected the entire sector, Reddy says, ''We have provided enough securities (sic) and will, if necessary dispose some assets to meet our obligations.'' Notch one up for affirmative action.

-E. Kumar Sharma

India's Own Teraflop Wonder
India becomes the fifth nation in the world to build a teraflop-scale supercomputer.

CDAC's Chattopadhyay with the Param Padma: Beyond the box

On April 1, India's Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, a government research arm based in Bangalore unveiled Param Padma, India's first teraflop supercomputer. With its ability to handle one trillion floating point operations per second, pp may be much slower than the world's fastest supercomputer, Earth Simulator, but it is enough to propel India into an exclusive club of five countries that have machines of this capability: US, Japan, Israel, China, and now India.

The new machine is 10 times faster than its predecessor, India's first supercomp, Param 10,000. ''The entire supercomputing achievement is an answer to the denial of technology to us by developed countries,'' gushes Subrata Chattopadhyay, the head of the system software development group at CDAC, striking a nationalist note.

The machine occupies a floor area of 1,800 square metres at CDAC's knowledge city in Byappanhalli; it boasts some 14.5 kilometre of communication- and 5.5 kilometre of power-cabling; and is cooled by a 39 tonne air-conditioner. Param Padma isn't a single computer but a cluster of 62 built around 248 IBM Power 4 processors, each with a clockspeed of 1 GHz. The data is served up by six file servers, each with 24 of Sun's UltraSparc III processors with a clockspeed of 900 MHz. Chattopadhyay sees uses for Param Padma in long-time supercomp favourite weather forecasting, seismic data processing, oil exploration, and molecular modelling.

It cost CDAC Rs 24 crore to build Param Padma, a tenth, Chattopadhyay says, of what it would have taken elsewhere in the world. Now, she will feature among the world's 500 fastest supercomputers.

-Venkatesha Babu

CATECHISM
Supercomputer Basics

The Earth Simulator: The fastest of them all

What is a supercomputer?

These are the most powerful computers of their time that work on complex problems. IBM's ASCI Purple, for instance, simulates the ageing and operation of nuclear weapons for the US Department of Energy

How is supercomputer performance measured?

The Linpack measure of floating point operations per second is used to measure supercomputer performance. Floating point ops are those that deal with fractions - they take longer than computations involving integers.

What is the world's fastest supercomputer today?

NEC's Earth Simulator at the Earth Simulation Centre in Yokohama is. It boasts a top speed of 35.86 Teraflops a second and does climate modelling.