It finally took some imaginative copy by a few impressionable young journalists to create some buzz- just a modicum of it-around the latest round of the soap wars. Remember the 1990s, when Ariel and Surf Excel went head to head, toe to toe, and before that, the mid-1980s when Wheel and Nirma went at it? Well, Procter & Gamble (P&G) and Hindustan Lever Limited (HLL) were at it again in the first week of March: the former reduced prices of Ariel and Tide by between 33 per cent and 50 per cent and the latter followed suit for its Surf Excel brand. What should have been big news in the Rs 6,000-crore soaps and detergents market was duly noted on Page 1 by most financial dailies that then moved on to, well, more pressing news.

These days, that's the kind of treatment the Rs 7,000-crore carbonated soft drinks (CSD) industry gets too. One P-word, price, is passé, although two more, pesticide and pollution remain relevant. And the soap and the cola wars, it is evident, are outmoded. They may remain among the most advertised categories on television, but consumer interest and that intangible thingamajig called 'happeningness', a function of competition, deregulation, and investments in the business, have moved on to other markets such as automobiles, telecommunications, and financial services. ''Change is what drives us as people now and that reflects our interest in new-world product categories,'' says Santosh Desai, President, McCann-Erickson Advertising.

With the economy growing at 8 per cent plus, the fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector's struggle to eke out 1 and 2 per cent growth is out of sync with the image of India consumers like to see. Even colas, once synonymous with the great march of capitalism, have become old-world. ''Colas have become a boring product now,'' admits Harish Bijoor, an independent marketing consultant. Worse, most FMCG brands have become near-commodities.

Today's happening markets are mobile phones (a growth rate of over 100 per cent in 2003), cars (20 per cent in the first nine months of 2003), motorcycles (12 per cent), and consumer loans (65 per cent according to numbers provided by icici Bank). And so, consumers are more interested in the car market that is expected to touch close to one million units this year and in the mobile telephony one where Reliance has just launched a pre-paid option. The selling pitches happen at a feverish pace. ACNielsen ORG-MARG's AdEx report indicates that mobile telephone manufacturers were the eighth largest advertisers on television last year; they were ranked 40 in 2002 (car companies moved up from nine to seven and two-wheeler ones from 10 to six).

Things could change if FMCG companies discover an all-new unique selling proposition. Given their track record, though, there's a better chance pigs will fly.

SECOND COMING
The Spark Avatar

Once the symbol of foreign direct investment in India, Daewoo's Greater Noida factory became the setting for a battle between banks that had loaned Daewoo India some Rs 1,500 crore and militant unions. Now, the mothballed plant could see some activity. Seventeen months after buying out Daewoo Motors in Korea, General Motors has decided to acquire the company's assembly line (as opposed to the engine and transmission ones) in India. This capacity of 85,000 units a year, says Jay Cooney, VP, Communications Director, Asia Pacific, GM, will help the company foray into the "massive mini-car segment". Cooney expects the plant to go on-line in 12-15 months. Coupled with GM's 50,000 units a year facility at Halol, Gujarat, the acquisition, says Cooney, will make "GM India a player to be reckoned with". First off, the plant is expected to produce Chevrolet Spark (a reworked Daewoo Matiz).

-Kushan Mitra

NEWSMAKER
Arun Shourie, 62

Journalists are like town criers. They spread the news, highlight instances of injustice by bringing them to public notice, and direct a shrill brand of indignation that only the honest can carry off at wrong doers of all hues. Ministers are different, or, at the least, supposed to be. They are administrators, wielders of enormous power who mete out justice (or dispense favours). Some of them are also politicians first and administrators later, but since India's Minister for Disinvestment, Information Technology, and Telecommunications, Arun Shourie isn't a member of the democratic Lower House of India's Parliament, but of the more-elitist Upper House, he is, arguably, an administrator first and politico later. He was also, in an earlier life, one of India's most respected investigative journalists and kept up a shrill campaign against the Ambanis of Reliance.

Shourie's impressive stint at The Indian Express showed the world that he was passionate about causes. The pursuit of truth is the common cause for most investigative journalists and the man brought to this quest a mixture of analytical skills, straightforward wordplay, near-religious zeal and doggedness that made him the best in the business. He seems to have carried these traits into his ministerial office. The cause, this time, was disinvestment of the government's majority holding in a variety of businesses. This magazine has always batted for the cause; ergo, its ideology isn't very different from the minister's. Shourie's zeal appears to have motivated his unorthodox approach to the process: when certain political lobbies opposed the privatisation of some government-owned hotels, he orchestrated a media campaign highlighting the deplorable financial status of the properties (including two articles authored by himself that this magazine was proud to feature).

Recent events, however, show that the minister may have just allowed his passion for disinvestment to cloud his usually impeccable logic some. A quick recap: the government decides to divest part of its stake in six public sector companies, some blue-chips, over 20 days to raise Rs 14,000 crore. The route? Initial public offerings through the book-building route that one merchant banker calls "hardly IPOs because it was (is) an artificial book-building exercise; everything that investors wanted to know about these companies was known; and most investment banks wanted to part of the book-building". Surjit Bhalla, Managing Director, Oxus Research and Investments, a New Delhi-based emerging-markets advisory, explains that any effort to build a book artificially for a blue-chip stock that is already in everybody's portfolio is accompanied by selling pressure. "The collective pressure to sell depresses the price of the stock for a short time period before it bounces back when the selling pressure stops," says Bhalla. Investors, then, manage this by selling the stock, and then buying it back at a lower price. That's exactly what happened in this case.

Shourie saw red: he told investment bankers the government knew who was hammering stock prices, blamed two corporate houses, and in an interview to a television news channel, said, "I told them (investment banks) that we have the records and that they are being watched." The big brother attitude did the trick: the bulls returned to the market, the PSU stock the government was selling found many takers, and PSU scrips moved up smartly. Unfortunately, the episode dented Shourie's credentials as a laissez faire reformer. And in this magazine's opinion, he has the distinction of being the second minister in recent times to, well, take things personally.

-Ashish Gupta

GOOD NEWS
Gains Of Peace: Rs 500,000 For 10 Seconds

» The price of peace becomes evident as Ten Sports manages to sell 10-second spots for the forthcoming India-Pakistan cricket series for Rs 500,000.

» The government slashes excise duty on steel products from 16 per cent to 8 per cent, and removes import duty on coking coal; the steel boom accelerates.

-Ashish Gupta

BAD NEWS
Oil Slick Ahead

» Domestic oil prices are set to rise again, with the international price of crude nudging $37 a barrel.

» India's exports, which grew by 42 per cent in December 2003, grew by a mere 8.7 per cent in January 2004.

» A US Court of Appeals declares that Dr. Reddy's hypertension generic did infringe on some patents held by Pfizer.

-Ashish Gupta