- Saturday, March 01, 2025
By: Shubham Ghosh
Here are news related to Indian economy and business for Tuesday, April 11, 2023:
Apple is opening its first retail stores in India, beginning next week, the global tech giant which entered the country two decades ago announced on Tuesday, ANI reported. The Apple BKC store in Mumbai will open on April 18 while the Apple Saket store in Delhi will open its doors to customers two days later. While Apple’s Mumbai store will open at 11 am local time, the Delhi outlet will open for customers at 10 am local time. The US tech giant had launched its first online store in India in 2020 and was supposed to launch its physical stores soon after but plans were stalled due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Some Indian startups have asked a court to suspend Alphabet Inc Google’s new in-app billing fee system until the country’s antitrust body investigates the American firm for alleged non-compliance with its directives, a legal filing showed, Reuters reported. Last month, Alliance of Digital India Foundation asked India’s antitrust regulator to probe Google for devising a new system startups say still charges them a high service fee. It allegedly happened despite an antitrust directive in October to allow use of third-party billing services for in-app payments.
The income-tax department has detected “bogus” expenditure and alleged financial irregularities worth Rs 1,000 crore (£98.1 million) after it raided some cooperative banks in poll-bound southern state of Karnataka sometime ago, India’s Central Board of Direct Taxes said Tuesday, PTI reported. The searches at 16 premises of these banks were launched on March 31 as the department suspected them to be “engaged in routing of funds of various business entities of their customers, in a manner, so as to abet them to evade their tax liabilities”.
Davaindia Generic Pharmacy, the largest private generic pharmacy retail chain and a brand of Zota Healthcare Ltd., touched a major milestone on Monday with the launch of its 100th Company Owned and Company Operated (COCO) store, ANI/PNN reported. The 100th store was launched in the Gulbarga district of the southern Indian state of Karnataka in the presence of Dr Sujit Paul, Group CEO of Zota Healthcare Ltd. Thousands of products, including generic medicines to treat acute and chronic ailments, in addition to a range of products in the health & wellness segment, Over The Counter (OTC) products, cosmetics, nutraceuticals, protein supplements, Ayurvedic products, and surgical products will be available at the most affordable prices at the store.
Astec LifeSciences, a subsidiary of Godrej Agrovet (GAVL), on Tuesday launched its research and development centre in Rabale in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, PTI reported. The facility ‘Adi Godrej Centre for Chemical Research and Development’ will focus on innovation and developing sustainable and safe solutions for people and the environment and providing services to innovator companies in the contract development & manufacturing space, the company said in a statement.
India’s opposition Indian National Congress on Tuesday alleged that public-sector Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) is being “forced” to use its policyholders’ funds to “bail out” the embattled Adani Group and stressed the demand for a joint parliamentary committee probe is “essential and urgent”, PTI reported. Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh claimed in a statement that LIC holding in Adani Enterprises, one of the listed companies of the Adani Group, at the end of June 2021 was 1.32 per cent while by the end of December last year, it reached 4.23 per cent.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) on Tuesday lowered India’s economic growth projection for the current fiscal to 5.9 per cent from 6.1 per cent earlier. Yet India will continue to be the fastest-growing economy in the world. In its annual World Economic Outlook, IMF also lowered the forecast for 2024-25 fiscal (April 2024 to March 2025) to 6.3 per cent from the 6.8 per cent it had predicted in January this year. The growth rate of 5.9 per cent in the 2023-24 fiscal compares to an estimated 6.8 per cent in the previous year.
