princess yacht now in india

Top-end luxury yachts are sailing into tap the super rich in India. Forget Bentley’s and business jets—Princess Yacht is here. These exclusive hand- made boats are 50-ft beauties. For the uninitiated, the price list is of great interest: they start from $500,000 for a 35-foot boat and go up to $7 million for a P95, a boat which is almost 100 feet tip to tip.
Says the 32-year-old Delhi-based entrepreneur, Vishal Choudhry of Aquamarine, the company that will sell Princess Yachts in India, “There is no experience like being on the high seas in a yacht. The endless ocean, the well-appointed private space in the yacht is the ultimate in luxury. We see a definite market in India and plan to sell three to five boats each year. We have already four enquiries for the P42, the first boat that comes this November. The rest will follow over the next one year.”
The bigger market is not in just stand-alone purchases of these yachts but in fractional ownership. Analysts see these boats as a great entertainment and event opportunities, and the market for fractional ownership is believed to be worth over Rs15 crore annually.
Says Olympian sailor Ashim Mongia, who now runs a yacht consultancy in West Cast Marine in Mumbai, “Fractional ownership has a huge market potential in India. We need better handling and many more marinas to tap into this potential. Currently most boats anchor off Bombay or Goa. However places like Cochin and Pondicherry need to be developed.”
Princess is offering the entry-level P42 in the fractional ownership mode. For Rs 30 lakh, this will give you access to the boat for four weeks. You can sail from Mumbai to Phuket or drop anchor and have fun just off-shore. Options include full crew, food and beverages and maintenance for an extra charge.”
That India may be seriously lacking in infrastructure has not prevented other top yacht makers from entering here. Waiting to drop anchor are two other top brands — Sunseeker of Britain and Fereddi. Sunseeker sold a massive 105-foot boat reportedly for $15 million to an undisclosed buyer in Goa recently and Fereddi has done a deal for 55-footer with another underscored Indian buyer.

globalisation is good for india as well as the MNC's

Consider the numbers. Walmart the world largest retailer sales $375 billion worth of stuff from its format retail stores world wide . This astounding figure is put in perspective when you consider that it is much bigger than the GDP's of Pakistan which in 2007 was a comparative meager $1.275 billion. If that is not enough, Citibank with all its troubles is a firm with a turn over of $2 trillion which is double the GDP of India.
There is no doubting the fact that globalization has spurred multinational firms to record size . The very structure of these firms with bases where the best return on investment are possible allow then to leverage global opportunities and grow. In itself this should be a good thing. For instance countries where there is a labor surplus with good infrastructure can attract MNC investment and help their own populations and economies to grow. The resultant purchasing power improvement can help create viable middle class as well. Indeed India is also as much a gainer from globalisation as these massive MNC's. With a large pool of labor and a vast market the mnc's invested as much as $16 billion in 2007 in India and are likely to invest another $25 billion in 2008
So what is the problem with the MNC's size? There are plenty of issues and surprising both the Indian left and the American right share concerns. the foremost significance is that it is perceived that the multinational of their sheer size and spread are beyond sovereign regulations of individual countries.
This is a misleading assessment. Countries where robust regulations exist or evolve can in fact use MNC's to their advantage. China is one such example which after making the MNC's invest in access of 300 billion dollars over the last fifteen years have now changed regulations and restricted MNC's investments as well as profit reparation. The Chinese have also come up with a government owned firm that will invest $200 billion some of it in these vary MNC's. This is the creativity of globalist which allows sensible countries to benefit from the MNC/s. The sovereign state of today is not yesterday's banana republic The fact is that dependence works both ways in globalisation. A win win situation should not be made into a scare story just because individual firms have leveraged the global opportunity to grow.

the ball is in play

Americans have cruel saying, “ If you are so smart how come you ain't rich?” The nay Sayers about the astronomical sums offered at the Indian players league auction need to keep that one in mind. Obviously the barons who bid know something that others do not.

By any estimation the bid was a grand success. Half a dozen players went for more than a million dollars a contract. Each ball that Harbhajan Singh bowls for the Mumbai team for example is worth 100,000 rupees. A no ball by him will put an opportunity cost of 50,000 on his personal account. An impressive 50 million dollars was splashed on the first among equals on the cricket pitch during the course of this momentous auction.
This may seem outlandish, but so did Kerry packer’s pajama cricket back in the 70’s. That created history. In a television driven, trillion-dollar economy that is today’s India with cricket as a prime pastime for at least 300 million citizens, the sums offered do not look odd. The IPL deal needs to be placed in the context of the larger picture where entertainment and sports sponsorship are estimated to be a $16 billion business. A large chunk of this in the sports domain comes from the game of cricket.
Like in cricket, so in life there will be winners and there will be losers. Some teams who have the firepower and the stadia that can manage to charge the 500 rupee a ticket that the league is banking on to make money will do well. So on paper Mohali and Calcutta are likely to do well. Others may have given way to irrational exuberance.
In the end the cake of the sport business is beings baked afresh. The IPL is a refreshing and even revolutionary idea from a board known to ignore basic necessities like training and equipping its sportsmen. In the end the hype will matter for little. It will be the paying fans loyalty to the twenty format and his city that may determine the glory of this incredible and audacious endeavor. It is important that the IPL works since it will add depth and dimensions to a beloved sport that sociologist Ashis Nandy famously described as an Indian game that the British discovered accidentally.

indian stock market anchors need transperancy

Media needs to be more transparent
Switch on any business channel on television and you have the same picture. An anchor sits in a plush studio with two “experts” gleefully telling the viewers which stock to buy, and which to dump. By the way of exposure you have a half a second clip which tell you that the said “expert “ holds stock in the very company he is pontificating about. This has clearly irritated the country’s stock exchange watchdog the securities and exchange board of India. Its out going chairman Mr. Damodaran made this much plain in a recent interview to the Indian Express. When a regulator held in wide esteem as a sensible overseer takes notice of the media it raises several questions.
In the United States, especially post Enron, there are specific provisions that channels have to follow including a detailed discourse of number of stocks and likely investment positions in the futures markets before they come on television and speak on a particular stock. None of this alas is in existence in the Indian media.
The lack of such disclosure has the potential to create a herd mentality in bull runs. It can also hurt the retail investor given the fact that some of the large business houses hold a significant percentage as ownerships in business channels. Thus if an industrialist has a major stake in a media house that owned a television channel and comes up with an IPO it can be a case of conflict of interest for him to manipulate a stock.
The real concern is that although SEBI has made two attempts to work out a self-regulating code of conduct for the media there has been no response from the media. This arrogance may cost the media some of its dearly loved freedom. When self-regulation is absent, inevitably governments find ways to impose their will.The media needs to heed this wake up call and line up a code of conduct that makes their manner more transparent. Such a move will help them, their viewers and the retail investors. Not so doing could cost the media its credibility and some of its freedom.

soros looks @ indian entertainment sector

When billionaires come together industries shake. The decision by billionaire investor George Soros top put $100 million for a three percent staked in Anil Ambani’s Reliance Entertainment has indeed shaken up the sector .

Go to any film studio in Mumbai or a gaming café in Bangalore and you can see that consumer interest and easy availability through retail is allowing for a boom in India’s entertainment sector. The Indian leisure classes love their movies and their TV shows and there are more then 150 million of these willing to pay for content.
According to Price Waterhouse coopers, a consultancy, Indian entertainment industry has a turnover of $10 billion. It is estimated that the industry will be worth $13 billion by 2010.

The crucial difference this time is that this industry is moving away from fragmentation. Mr. Ambani’s enterprise for instance has under its roof more then 100 theaters across India and an equal number planned in the US. It also has film production firms that have signed upon big names in bollywood. Add to the menu gaming portals, postproduction faculties, an animation firm, TV programming companies, DVD distribution, FM channels with a pan Asian presence and music. What emerges is a media conglomerate in the making that can do the famed end-to-end operations Ambani style.
The larger industry too is growing exceptionally. New television channels are multiplying like rabbits similar growth is there in sectors such as movies and magazines. The Indian consumer is growing richer and more literate and there is also the back up of the foreign residing Indians hungry for content from back home. The annual growth of 18 % in this industry is looking to get bigger.
In all this growth however there are real issues distribution still remains a bottleneck though direct to home access will in time change that. The entertainment industry is heavily taxed making film tickets expensive even in small towns. Revenue models from entertainment avenues including FM radio and the Internet are in its infancy. However investors like Soros have taken a bet that a foot n the door now will ensure rich rewards as the market matures. This appears to be a good bet.