Tata Tea successfully places $75m
Mumbai: As part of its efforts to raise finance to fund its acquisition of Tetley Tea, Tata Tea Limited successfully placed its GDRs valued at $75m. The issue was priced at $9.87 per GDR, which translates into a five per cent discount on the prevailing BSE price for the Tata Tea share.

The company received a total of $95m from which it will retain the target amount and refund the balance. The proceeds of the issue will be used for its investment in Tata Tea (Great Britain) Limited, the vehicle set up for the Tetley acquisition. The issue is stated to have attracted investment from high quality investors from Asia, Europe and the US.
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Wipro to plan ADR
Mumbai: In an effort to expand its operations in the US mainly through acquisitions, Wipro Limited is planing an ADR. The size of the issue is currently pegged at $150m, but may be raised later. The company has appointed JM Morgan Stanley as lead managers for the issue and may appoint two more investment bankers to manage it.

The company has been aggressively expanding its international operations in the recent past, the results of which are clear to see. In the first nine months of the current financial year, its global research and development and telecom solutions divisions have turned in 46 per cent of the software revenues of the company. The company may also plan to list its shares in the US exchanges sometime in the near future.
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GE plans research base at Bangalore
New Delhi: Global giant, General Electric (GE) today announced its plans to set up a top quality research and development base in India. To be set up in Bangalore, this centre will, in the next two years, employ more than 1,500 engineers and scientists. The centre has already appointed 150 engineers and scientists from top class educational institutions.

The importance of this decision can be gauged from the fact that this centre will be only the second such centre for GE, the first one being in the company headquarters at Connecticut, US. Besides providing back up support to the prestigious Connecticut centre, the Bangalore centre will also be the main provider of research support to the various GE businesses around the globe.
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MTNL to get into software through the acquisition route
New Delhi: Not to be left behind in the IT and software boom, MTNL, the country's leading basic telephone services provider, is all set to increase its presence in the telecom software arena.

This was announced by the chairman and managing director of MTNL, Mr. S. Rajagopalan. The company perceives that the growth in the telecom software sector in the coming years will be immense and is talking to several leading telecom software companies for equity positions.

In addition to this the company will expand its internet business to include e-commerce in a big way. It is already in the process of setting up an authentication service that will facilitate the e-commerce process.
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Gujarat Ambuja completes DLF Cement takeover
New Delhi: Gujarat Ambuja Cements (GACL), which managed to walk away with DLF Cements from right under the nose of a large MNC bidder, has completed the process fo the entire takeover. After having mopped up an additional 13 per cent of DLF shares through the open offer to its shareholders which closed on February 17, GACL now holds 42.2 per cent of DLF Cements.

The company began tightening its hold over the latter by getting three of the old directors of DLF, who held the positions of chairman, vice chairman and managing director respectively, to step down. In their places GACL appointed its own nominees to the board.

DLF factories have already started producing cement under the 'Ambuja' brand name. GACL is in the process of restructuring the operations of DLF and intends retiring some of its very expensive debt burden. It also plans to introduce a superior business model to follow and increase all round efficiencies.
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Infosys begins incubation of staff projects
Bangalore: In keeping with its chairman, Mr. Narayana Murthy's, objective that Infosys will encourage its employees to come up with winning projects, the company has started evaluating projects put forward by the employees. The company is using this to fund great technological ideas and invest in talent.

The first of such projects called 'Onscan', which is a comprehensive web notification service for web users. The company hopes to incubate many more such projects in the near future.
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Cray to be sold for less than $100m
San Francisco: Cray Computers, one of the pioneers in the development of the world's largest and fastest computers, is being sold by its parent company, Silicon Graphics, to a relatively smaller player, Tera Computers, in a $100m deal.

Tera, which is also in the business of developing high performance super-computers, will buy the entire supercomputer business of Cray, including the brand name, existing service contracts, the developmental Cray vector computer line and its three manufacturing facilities in the US.
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Lucent bags lucrative Chinese contract
Beijing: As Chinese telecom service providers rush to set up state-of-the-art networks ahead of the competition setting in from MNCs as part of the WTO mandate, Lucent Technologies, the world's largest and foremost telecommunications equipment maker has landed itself with lucrative supply contracts.

Lucent has bagged contracts valued at over $100m to supply network equipment to Chinese telecom service providers.
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Nokia penetrates Japanese market
Helsinki: Finnish telecom equipment major, Nokia, made a breakthrough in the Japanese market when it was chosen by Japan Telecom as its partner in the development of third generation mobile telephony network.

Under the agreement reached with Japan Telecom, Nokia would supply its latest third generation WCDMA technology and radio access network solutions to the Japanese giant. This technology would also enable the Japanese telecom giant to offer its subscribers mobile internet access.
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EC may block Volvo-Scania merger
Brussels : A $6.9b merger proposal that will see Swedish company Volvo and Scandinavian company Scania join together to form a commercial vehicle monolith is likely to be spiked by the European Commission.

The Commission, which in its entire history has blocked only 11 deals, is of the view that the merger would create too powerful an entity in the Nordic markets, which will not be good for competition.

Both Volvo - which had earlier sold its car division to Ford to concentrate on the commercial vehicles segment -- and Scania state that the rejection of the merger deal would leave them both open to takeover threats.
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