HEADLINER
Karan Paul

ONE OF EVERY 10 TEA Drinkers in the UK will now wake up to a cuppa served by the Kolkata-based Apeejay Surrendra Group. Last fortnight, the group, which is one of the largest exporters of tea to the UK, acquired the Typhoo tea brand from Britain's Premier Foods Plc for £80 million (Rs 632 crore), signalling its entry into the branded tea market. Typhoo is the third largest tea brand in the UK after Tetley and PG Tips, and has a packaging and blending plant too at Moreton near Liverpool. "We were aggressively looking for opportunities to grow-both in plantations and retailing of branded products-so what could have been a better opportunity than acquiring the iconic British brand?" asks Karan Paul, Apeejay Group's 35-year-old Chairman. Apeejay, one of the largest tea growers in the country with 17 estates and 21 million kg in annual production, has acquired Typhoo through its international arm, and Paul says the business will continue to be independent. The process of acquisition is to be completed in a few weeks from now and a new management team will be put in place to run the show.

-Ritwik Mukherjee

Honda Revs Up

HMSI MD Yukihiro Aoshima: Top gear

Japanese auto giant Honda is moving into high gear. Barely months after a bloody workers' strike at its Manesar (near Gurgaon) plant brought its low-profile scooters business under the national glare, Honda Motor Scooters India (HMSI) has announced plans of investing Rs 400 crore to triple its annual production of motorcycles to 600,000. Rivals should be worried. As it is, Honda is the largest motorcycle manufacturer in the country through its joint venture with the Munjals. An expansion, expected to go on stream by April 2008, would significantly widen its lead.

Air Deccan Flying High

India's pioneering low-cost carrier, Air Deccan, is going full thrust ahead. Soon after signing a sweet deal with Vijay Mallya's Kingfisher Airlines for selling its excess capacity on low-traffic routes for a reported Rs 2 crore (Kingfisher needed those miles to meet regulatory norms), Deccan Aviation, the carrier's holding company, announced the launch of Air Rescue One, a critical care air ambulance service in association with Delhi-based Escorts Heart Institute and Research Centre. A day earlier it had announced the start of an in-flight shopping initiative.

BP India's Jhawar: Joining hands

BP And HPCL Deal Time

BP (formerly British Petroleum) signed a joint venture with Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ltd (HPCL) to enter the oil refining and marketing business in India. The JV envisages setting up a nine-million-tonne refinery in Bhatinda, Punjab, for $3 billion, although in the long run BP also wants to enter oil exploration in the country.

NEWSMAKERS
THE VC BUG

Strange bedfellows: Biyani (left) and Gupta

Opportunity, it seems, is the mother of odd business partners. How else could you explain the coming together of retail king and Pantaloon owner Kishore Biyani and out-of-job former Coca-Cola India boss, Sanjiv Gupta, to set up a retail and "consumption" sector fund of $400 million (Rs 1,760 crore)? Neither of the men has known the other for any long period of time, but both think the partnership is perfect. "Sanjiv comes from a solid distribution background and both of us are strong believers in the Indian consumer's growing power to consume," says Biyani, whose retail-to-real-estate empire includes the Pantaloon stores, the Big Bazaar chain and Central malls.

The fund, which is yet to line up investors, intends to invest in mid-sized companies in the food, fashion, entertainment and media business. "We will give these companies the capital needed to grow big enough to take advantage of the consumption boom in India," says Biyani, adding that the duo doesn't want to be known as venture capitalists (VCs), but "mentor capitalists". The fund, when set up, will be managed by Sanjiv, with Biyani playing the role of a sleeping partner (we'll see about that). The retailer says that several prospects have already been identified. But as anybody in the VC business will tell you, identifying prospects is the easy part. Handholding and grooming them to a stage where profitable exits are possible, is the hard part. That's where even the best names in the business trip up. Messrs Gupta and Biyani will, then, need both patience and smarts to pull their fund off.

-Kushan Mitra

NUMBERS OF NOTE

1 billion: Squatters in the world today. Current projections show there will be 2 billion squatters by 2030. By 2050, they will grow to 3 billion, more than one in three people on the planet

$1.38 billion (Rs 6,072 crore): Value of 62 overseas deals inked by Indian companies so far this year

387%: Growth in home theatre sales between January and August, according to ACNielsen

Rs 39,891: Per capita annual expenditure on household consumption at Kollam (district in Kerala), even ahead of Pune at Rs 32,648

$790 million (Rs 3,476 crore): Sale of digital music in the first six months of the year, up from $220 million (Rs 968 crore) during the same period a year earlier

$32 billion (Rs 1,408,00 crore): Annual loss suffered by the software industry to piracy. In the pharmaceuticals sector up to 10 per cent of products worldwide are counterfeit, rising to as much as 50 per cent to 60 per cent in the developing world

Rs 60,000 crore ($13.6 billion): Capital needed by India's banking sector to achieve 30 per cent annual growth through 2010; banks raised just Rs 3,000 crore between 2001 and 2004

$432 billion (Rs 19,00,800 crore): The value of Asia-Pacific's entertainment and media industries, driven by gains in China and India, by 2009. The US would remain the largest media market at $690 billion (Rs 30,36,000 crore), according to PriceWaterhouseCoopers

$55 billion (Rs 2,42,000 crore): Size of the global video game industry compared to $25 billion (Rs 1,10,000 crore) in 2004

304 million-plus: The number of households with DVD players in the world by 2009; there will be 321 million households with broadband internet access and 167 million ones with subscription TV

Yusuf "Mr Generics" Hamied
The feisty drug maker plans to copy Roche's avian flu drug-for a cause.

Cipla's Hamied: Mdicine man

Every time Yusuf Hamied, the reclusive chairman of Mumbai-based drug major Cipla, gets cheesed off about patented high-priced, but life-saving, drugs, Big Pharma shudders. The last time he decided to go after them, he launched aids drugs (known as anti-retro virals, ARVs) for a fraction of the Big Pharma prices. This time around, he's trained his sight on a drug that could save millions of lives should the next big epidemic, the avian flu, hit mankind. There's just one manufacturer, Roche, of the anti-influenza drug, Tamiflu, and many experts expect a short supply should the bird flu quickly spread around the world. "We'll do with Tamiflu what we did with the aids drug," Hamied told BT over the phone when contacted in Spain. "Somebody's got to do it."

At present, Cipla plans to be in a "state of readiness" to manufacture a generic copy of the drug, but the Swiss company will certainly take Cipla to court in the case of a launch. In India, Tamiflu was filed with a "priority date" of February 26, 1995, making its patent recognisable under the new patent laws, which honour all patents filed after January 1, 1995. But Hamied isn't mad at innovator companies like Roche. He's mad at the Indian government, which agreed to recognise patents filed after January 1, 1995, although the WTO provisions allowed countries like India to do so starting January 1, 2005. "I don't know how and why they did this (in 2000, under a provision called exclusive marketing rights)," fumes Hamied, who promises to make his copy of Tamiflu available at "humanitarian prices".

-R. Sridharan

A NOTED

Dismissed: By a British court, a plea filed by Ranbaxy to annul pharma giant Pfizer's main patent over its cholesterol-lowering drug Lipitor. Judge Nicholas Pumfrey, however, handed Brian Tempest-led Ranbaxy a minor victory by declaring invalid a second patent, which was due to expire in 2011, a year later than the main patent. The court's verdict, to be challenged by both Ranbaxy and Pfizer over their respective defeats, means the Indian drug company cannot sell a generic copy of Lipitor in the UK until 2011. A similar patent challenge in the US is to be decided by the year-end.

Ranked: Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) as third after MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and the University of California at Berkeley, by the Times Higher Education Supplement in London. The IITs now leave behind other global technology institutions as Stanford and Georgia Tech. University. The rankings are based on peer review of 2,375 academics, who are involved in research, in areas like science and technology, biomedicine and humanities.

Announced: The 2005 Nobel prize for economics. The award will be shared by two game-theory experts-an Israeli, Robert J. Aumann, 75, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and an American, Thomas C. Schelling, 84, of the University of Maryland. The Nobel committee lauded the pair for enhancing "our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis".

Bought: By Shyam Bhartia's Jubilant Organosys, an integrated pharmaceuticals company, a US-based clinical research organisation (CRO)-Target Research Associates-in an all-cash deal for $33.5 million (Rs 147.4 crore). The first ever acquisition of a US CRO by an Indian company makes Jubilant the largest Indian CRO having operations in India and the US.

Appointed: Retired IAS officer, Wajahat Habibullah, as the first Chief Information Commissioner, under the new Right to Information Act, which gives statutory rights to citizens to obtain information from public authorities. The new law will not be applicable in J&K.

A BRACE OF KINGS

The man in the suit is Lakshmi Mittal, the world's richest Indian; the man dressed like a politician is the most powerful man in the state of Jharkhand, its chief minister Arjun Munda. They're smiling because Mittal Steel and the state of Jharkhand have just signed a deal for a steel project. The picture is taken from a newspaper ad (one of several) that Munda's government released the following day. That should have helped those who missed the live telecast of the event (well, it was treated as one) on an enterprising business channel. It should also help Munda re-brand himself as the man who brought the prodigal son back to India. Did we miss something? No, but this magazine is missing a full-page ad.

MANI'S DIKTAT

Petroleum Minister Aiyar: Just blend it

Agreed that biodiesel is the need of the hour. But the Union Petroleum Minister Mani Shankar Aiyar's diktat to public sector oil companies to start buying biodiesel to blend with their regular diesel (in a 5:95 ratio) has left them in a bind. "Even if we were to blend only 5 per cent of biodiesel, we will need more than 20 lakh tonnes per annum," says a senior executive in an oil company. India has an installed biodiesel capacity of 50 tonnes a day. But Leena Mehendale, Joint Secretary, Petroleum Ministry and Executive Director of Petroleum Conservation Research Association, says that demand, and not supply is the issue. "Once the oil companies start buying (biodiesel) on a regular basis, the capacities will be increased," she says. Quality is another issue. If biodiesel were to be sourced from disparate sources around the country, monitoring and ensuring quality will be near impossible. "Oil companies will have to install the equipment to check the standard of supplies," says Mehendale. There's hope for the biodiesel advocates yet. There's a lot of global interest in the sector. The UK's d1 Oils, for instance, plans to set up an 8,000-tonnes-a-year biodiesel refinery near Chennai by next year.

-Archna Shukla