Antriksh Marketing
Antriksh Marketing
Antriksh Marketing
Political uncertainty and elections slated in the coming months, besides the condition of state-wise approval to retail FDI and tough sourcing conditions, were among the other roadblocks for retail chains, including the foreign ones, experts said. Also, the challenging global retail environment might force the likes of Walmart to focus on existing key markets.
The petition has made the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi), Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the commissioner of Nagpur police and Union of India parties to the case. Typically, a gold saving scheme collects monthly instalments from customers for at least 11 months, after which the investor gets some benefits (concessions or discounts) on the principal, which can be redeemed against gold jewellery sold by the firm in the 12th month. For instance, the Golden Harvest scheme by Tanishq, a unit of Tata group Titan Industries Ltd, which has at least 1.5 million customers, requires the customer to pay advance instalments for 11 months. The 12th month instalment is paid by Tanishq and the accumulated amount can be redeemed against gold jewellery by the customer. The minimum monthly instalment amount for Golden Harvest is Rs.500. The PIL contends that the schemes involve collection of money from the public at large and that there is no control over such schemes and no accountability in case the scheme ends in failure. According to Sebi, any scheme offered by a company under which the contributions made by investors are pooled and managed on their behalf with a profit motive is a collective investment scheme (CIS). At present, CISs are regulated by Sebi while RBI regulates non-banking finance companies and the state governments oversee chit funds. The PIL has sought an enquiry into gold saving schemes, alleging that they are no different from deposittaking schemes. The PIL also alleges that there is no mechanism (to recover money) if any jewellery shop owner or company has gone into liquidation and such schemes need to be banned. While RBI, Sebi and the police have responded to an earlier Right to Information (RTI) application filed by Agrawal stating that the schemes do not fall under their purview, the PIL has sought a fresh enquiry into the schemes by the regulators. RBI has, however, maintained that since Tanishq and similar jewellery firms are not registered with it as non-banking finance companies, the schemes do not fall under its purview. The banking regulator clarified that schemes like Golden Harvest do not amount to acceptance of deposits.
We coined a new word 'Unformal' to grab attention: Anand Parekh, Vimal (Social)
Vimal, the textile brand of Reliance Industries, will declare the end of ties and "stereotypical formals" with the launch of a new range called Unformals on Friday. Unformal, a new word the company has coined, stands for 'unusual formal', says Anand Parekh, president of Reliance's textile division. It is targeted at people, particularly youth, who want to be a little easy without disrespecting the formal setup, Parekh told ET in an interview. Excerpts: The new campaign, 'Be Unformals' reaches out to a different category of consumer altogether through four groups of products, namely, fashion jacketing, fashion cottons, fashion and feel and fashion ceremonials. Fashion jacketing would offer jacketing fabric beyond blues and grays and would have a wide spectrum of colours and designs.
We had been exporting similar fabrics to the US, Western Europe and Japan and would now introduce this in India. Fashion cottons is more about offering comfort of cotton in formal wear. This would be the first time that we would introduce fabrics with 80% cotton component for comfort. Fashion and feel is a technology product. While the fabric would look woollen, there would not be any wool in it. This would be cool and comfortable and could be used for trousers or jackets. With fashion ceremonials, we would address the need of Indians to have comfortable yet stylish ethnic wear. This fabric would do away with the fabrics that are not worthy of skin-touch and could be used to make jodhpuris or achkans.