The Churchill Club’s annual Top 10 Tech Trends Dinner discussion post is here. The panel has some cool VCs in it. The post has important predictions and some cool factoids
- In Europe, cell phones are 8% of credit card payments
- Projectors in cell phones in next two years. More than one camera per cell phone
- About 90% of all venture returns made by about 5% of the people; global supply of capital has kept pouring in. Returns come from a very small set.
Lots of mobile devices related predictions. Go read the full thing.
A nice little stat to chew on a sunday morning.
PS : “Transit” refers to Public/mass transit systems.
From the news today (sorry, no link)
Reliance Industries has shut all of its 1,432 petrol pumps in the country after sales dropped to almost nil as it could not match the subsidized price offered by public sector players. The company owned less than 3% of the 36,936 petrol pumps in the country. Of the total retail outlets, state run Indian Oil, Bharat Petroleum and Hindustan Petroleum own 34,304 pumps, while the remaining belong to private sector Essar Oil and Shell India.
”Reliance has informed that sales at their retail outlets was negligible due to selling price differential between private and public sector ROs, leading to the closure of all their 1,432 pumps in the country with effect from March 15,” petroleum minister Murli Deora informed the Rajya Sabha on Tuesday.
Public sector currently sell petrol at a loss of Rs 13.97 a litre and diesel at a discount of Rs 20.97 per litre. This revenue loss is made up by the government through issue of oil bonds and subsidy share from upstream firms like ONGC and GAIL.
If this sounds ominous, Goldman Sachs economist Arjun Murti dropped a bombshell by writing,
“The possibility of $150-$200 per barrel seems increasingly likely over the next six-24 months”
To add to all this bad news on the Crude oil front, rupee has breached the 41 mark. The price action is very swift and a bit unnerving.
If these trends persist, are the Indian businesses operating on wafer thin margins (textiles, airlines, farming) sustainable ?
It appears that these low profit margin businesses are the biggest employers of Indian Masses ?
Food prices are at an all time high in most places around the globe. We have been reading news on Wheat, Edible Oil, Corn etc reaching their multi year highs. A report on the same topic reads
“Rising Food prices can be good news for the food companies who are attempting to pass along those higher food input prices to the consumer. They are maintaining or expanding margins and they are hopeful that the constraints on food supply and the changing and expanding global demand for food products will continue to put upward pressure on prices. “
Doesn’t this provide an obvious opportunity to invest in Food Companies & Farming ?
(6 votes, average: 4.33 out of 5)
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