Raymond to launch ready-made women’s garments
Mumbai: The Rs.2, 000 crore textile major - Raymond’s widely known as exclusive men’s wear company is now making a strategic foray into the ready-made women's wear. The range of women’s wear brands from Raymond would hit the retail market some time next year, Mr. Nabankar Gupta, group president at Raymond’s has said.

This is for the first time that, Raymond will enter the women's wear segment through its ready-made garment subsidiary company J K (Bombay), which owns men’s wear brands like Park Avenue and Parx. Currently, the men's branded wear market is estimated at roughly Rs 3,400 crore with women wear at Rs 350 crore. While men's wear is growing at 20 per cent, women's wear is growing at 7-8 per cent. Industry analysts therefore, feel that the women's wear segment has a larger potential to grow as it is still at the evolving stage and has few established players in the market.

The women's wear outfits will comprise of a combination of ethnic and western wear.
Apart from women's wear, the company is also looking at adding new brands in the various segments available. Raymond has a distribution network of 450 outlets, of which 250 are Raymond’s-own exclusive outlets.
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Marc Walker to launch spectacle frames for mass market
Ahmedabad: Premium spectacle frame manufacturer, Marc Walker Opticals Limited (MWOL) is contemplating a major change in its marketing and operations strategy, in an effort to compete with flood of Chinese and Korean imports. The company has decided to rework its focus and operations to come up with a lower priced, mass-market product range.

The Jhaveris in partnership with Gujarat Venture Finance set up the company to leverage the their background in jewellery design in the business of high value branded spectacle frames. But the company has accumulated losses in the last four years of operations thereby eroding its net worth.

The company had launched over 300 designs under the Marc Walker brand name, all with 3-micron gold plating, with a minimum retail price of Rs 1,000. Faced with unexpected competition from imports, MWOL later introduced a cheaper sub-brand named Columbia, retailing at Rs 600. Now it has moved one step closer to the mass market, with a range of flash plated gold frames under the brand name Cortina.
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P&G to join hands with Chatterjee group for drug R&D
Calcutta: Chembiotek Research International (CRI), the contract research outfit funded by the Purnendu Chatterjee group and Procter & Gamble, the leading US pharma giant are negotiating for taking up collaborative work on basic research and drug discovery.

While the areas of work and modalities for a possible collaboration need to be finalised, sources say these could include combinatorial chemistry, IT-based drug discovery, genetics and other emerging areas in biotechnology.

CRI, a contract research organisation has been taking up research activities on behalf of leading global corporations. This includes full outsourcing in areas like drug discovery, developing and patenting drugs and compounds and research material. According to Dr. Douglas W Axelrod, director, discovery projects and biological sciences, P&G, the collaborative model works on shared intellectual investment by both companies, where such biotechnology and research companies get royalty once the drug is marketed.

P&G is also eyeing some companies in China, the UK and France to either contract out work or opt for the collaboration model for doing R&D for its pharma unit. P&G has already been working on such collaborative projects with US-based bio-technology companies like Regeseron and Gene Logic.
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Dabur reworking its insurance plans
New Delhi: Dabur India is planning to set up a separate company for the proposed insurance foray, which would be directly owned by the Dabur promoters, the Burman family. The Rs 1,000-crore Dabur India, has decided against a direct entry into the business since insurance is seen as a "non-core" area for the healthcare major.

The move to create a separate company is based on the advice of financial institutions, which have warned it of a possible erosion in shareholder value in case the company enters the insurance business on its own. Once the new company is set up, it will begin its search afresh for joint venture partners which have both the required net worth and the experience in life insurance.

It is not still clear how the new company would meet the minimum net worth criterion of Rs 500 crore as stipulated by the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority. The
Dabur India had earlier entered into a 76:24 joint venture with AllState Alliance of the US but the latter pulled out of the venture.
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