Indian Budget, How useful for Indian consumers

The optimists hoped that it might show the Indian economic miracle was back on track. Pessimists feared it would show a country descending into wild populism ahead of a general election due by mid-2014. In the event India’s budget day on February 28th was barely enough to stir India’s octogenarian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, who sat in parliament with his arms folded and eyes closed, as his spritely colleague, Palaniappan Chidambaram, the finance minister, trod a terribly fine line.

Most will have to pay at the old rate though the small taxpayers — those whose income is between Rs 2 lakh and Rs 5 lakh — get relief through a tax credit of up to Rs 2,000. This will benefit 1.8 crore people. Falling in the ambit of the rich tax will be 42,800 large tax payers.

While imposing the 10% tax surcharge on those with incomes above Rs 1 crore, the finance minister invoked the Azim Premji 'giving away' spirit. However, though he did leave the rich a little less rich, it wasn't as if he was distributing largesse to other taxpayers.

Following are highlights of the budget: 

• ·         India faces challenge of getting back to its potential growth rate of 8 pct 
• ·         India faces challenge of getting back to its potential growth rate of 8 pct 
• ·         India must unhesitatingly embrace growth as highest goal 
• ·         India faces challenge of getting back to its potential growth rate of 8 pct 
• ·         India must unhesitatingly embrace growth as highest goal 
• ·         Growth rate under UPA was highest 
• ·         Between 2004 and 2008 and again in 2009-10 and 2010-11 the growth rate was over 8% 
• ·         There is no reason for gloom or pessimism 
• ·         Global economic growth declined 

Growth: For growth He said that India faces challenge of getting back to its potential growth rate of 8 pct. India must unhesitatingly embrace growth as highest goal.

Current Account Deficit: India's greater worry is the current account deficit - will need more than $75 billion this year and next year to fund deficit.

Power and Energy sector: This sector Proposes zero customs duty for electrical plants and machinery.

Agriculture: To allocate 801.94 billion rupees to rural development in 2013/14.

At least, however, a sense of restraint is now in place. That much Mr Chidambaram has achieved. Whether he made any difference to the bottlenecks that are holding back growth is far less sure. On the Goods and Services Tax, vital to sorting out the public finances in the long term, he promised he would bang heads together. He committed to looking at ways of getting the private sector in the coal industry, which is state owned and producing far too little of the black stuff. The truth is, though, that on meaty problems such as these he simply may not have enough time before the general election to make a big difference.

In just over a year, perhaps less, a new government, and perhaps a new finance minister will be in place. And for all Mr Chidambaram’s efforts, the commitment to economic reform among the political class may be skin deep. As he spoke in the chamber, most spending rises were cheered and met with a thumping of desks, not least by Sonia Gandhi, the dynast who heads the ruling congress party. Mr Chidambaram’s pledges on improving the investment climate and attracting manufacturing investment, however, were met with icy silence.

Electric bikes

If you’ve not ridden an electric bicycle yet, chances are you know someone who has. Or maybe someone rode past you on one and you thought it was a conventional bike. Changes in permitted power output means you’ll likely be seeing more, and better, electric bikes coming your way (or riding past you).

If you’ve been lured by an electric bike, my colleagues and I would like to hear from you, as I’ll discuss a little later. But first, for the uninitiated, let’s start with the basics: what is an electric bike?

An electric bike has motorised assistance that allows the cyclist to ride further with less effort. Think of it as having a reliable tailwind to help you on your way up hills.

A change of gear

Motorised assistance will cut out at 25km/h. You can go faster than 25km/h, but you need to be pedalling – the battery will not provide any extra push.

While some countries, and some states of the US, allow electric bikes of up to 1,000 watts, any bicycle powered by an auxiliary motor that exceeds 250 watts in Australia will be classified a motorbike and must be registered and ridden by a licenced rider.

In addition to further clarifying the definitions of electric bikes, the government’s changes to permitted power outputs have brought Australia inline internationally.

While 50 watts more may not seem a big increase, it’s potentially a game-changer for electric bikes.

For riders, it means going up hills will be a little easier, with extra torque, although the top speed will still cut out at 25km/h and the distance you can ride with electric motor assistance will be about the same.

Get in touch

Our findings will assist to develop future policies aimed at increasing the safety and sustainability of the transport system, including electric bikes.

Whether the electric bike provides a stepping stone from the car to a pedal bike remains to be seen. But the individual benefits that can be gained by reducing people’s reliance on cars and increasing their physical activity will also help reduce congestion and vehicle exhaust pollution on our roads.

While some bicycle models are clearly electric bikes with a battery pack plain to see, many of the models are not visibly electric and are difficult to differentiate for other road users.

As with all cycling activity, the question of safety also impacts electric bike riders and feeds into the issue of adequate and connected bicycle facilities on and off roads, as well as behavioural issues with other road users.

Ashu Francis: Oil Industry

Ashu Francis: Oil Industry: The petroleum industry includes the global processes of  exploration ,  extraction ,  refining , transporting (often by  oil tankers  and...

Oil Industry

The petroleum industry includes the global processes of exploration, extraction, refining, transporting (often by oil tankers and pipelines), and marketing petroleum products. The largest volume products of the industry are fuel oil and gasoline (petrol). Petroleum (oil) is also the raw material for many chemical products, including pharmaceuticals, solvents, fertilizers, pesticides, and plastics. The industry is usually divided into three major components: upstream,midstream and downstream. Midstream operations are usually included in the downstream category.

Petroleum is vital to many industries, and is of importance to the maintenance of industrial civilization in its current configuration, and thus is a critical concern for many nations. Oil accounts for a large percentage of the world’s energy consumption, ranging from as low of 32% for Europe and Asia, up to a high of 53% for the Middle East.

Other geographic regions’ consumption patterns are as follows: South and Central America (44%), Africa (41%), and North America (40%). The world consumes 30 billion barrels (4.8 km) of oil per year, with developed nations being the largest consumers. The United States consumed 25% of the oil produced in 2007. The production, distribution, refining, and retailing of petroleum taken as a whole represents the world's largest industry in terms of dollar value.

Governments such as the United States government provide a heavy public subsidy to petroleum companies, with major tax breaks at virtually every stage of oil exploration and extraction, including for the costs of oil field leases and drilling equipment.

Petroleum is a naturally occurring liquid found in rock formations. It consists of a complex mixture of hydrocarbons of various molecular weights, plus other organic compounds. It is generally accepted that oil is formed mostly from the carbon rich remains of ancient plankton after exposure to heat and pressure in the Earth's crust over hundreds of millions of years. Over time, the decayed residue was covered by layers of mud and silt, sinking further down into the Earth’s crust and preserved there between hot and pressured layers, gradually transforming into oil reservoirs.

Petroleum in an unrefined state has been utilized by humans for over 5000 years. Oil in general has been used since early human history to keep fires ablaze, and also for warfare.

Its importance in the world economy evolved slowly, with whale oil used for lighting into the 19th century and wood and coal used for heating and cooking well into the 20th Century. The Industrial Revolution generated an increasing need for energy which was fueled mainly by coal, with other sources including whale oil. However, it was discovered that kerosene could be extracted from crude oil and used as a light and heating fuel. Petroleum was in great demand, and by the twentieth century had become the most valuable commodity traded on the world markets.

Business Coaching

A Business Coach is a professionally trained coach with a background in small business issues who oversees, assists and guides you—the small business owner—in developing, starting, and growing your small business. The Business Coach helps you clarify your business goals and objectives and helps you develop the skills and acquire the resources needed to operate a successful enterprise. Your Business Coach meets with you on a regular basis, either in person or over the telephone, to discuss the current and future business and life issues you are facing. This structure keeps you and your business on the track you have set — continuously moving forward toward your goals and objectives. The results are that you experience clarity of what success means to you, and the means to create success.

Business Coaching is one of the fastest growing areas of business development. Business owners and corporate executives are beginning to realize that if they want to build successful businesses they need to look outside their immediate team.

Dramatic results can be made with clients seeing profits and growth explode.

The above statement is quite amazing but when it’s backed up by a guarantee you can see that this secret to changing other peoples businesses, so why not yours?

We spend most off our day working in our businesses and not working on our businesses, for most people the only time they work on the business is either whilst it’s being conceived or when the new budget is due!

Business coaching is the practice of providing support and occasional advice to an individual or group in order to help them recognize ways in which they can improve the effectiveness of their business. Business coaches work to improve leadership, employee accountability, teamwork, sales, communication, goal setting, strategic planning and more. It can be provided in a number of ways, including one-on-one tuition, group coaching sessions and large scale seminars. Business coaches are often called in when a business is perceived to be performing badly, however many businesses recognize the benefits of business coaching even when the organization is successful. Business coaches often specialize in different practice areas such as executive coaching, corporate coaching and leadership coaching.

At least two organizations, the International Coaching Council (ICC) and the Worldwide Association of Business Coaches (WABC) provide a membership-based association for professionals involved in business coaching. The ICC and WABC also provide an accrediting system for business coach training programs. The ICC currently has over 1,500 members from over 50 countries.

Business coaching is not the same as mentoring. Mentoring involves a developmental relationship between a more experienced "mentor" and a less experienced partner, and typically involves sharing of advice. A business coach can act as a mentor given that he or she has adequate expertise and experience. However, mentoring is not a form of business coaching. A good business coach need not have specific business expertise and experience in the same field as the person receiving the coaching in order to provide quality business coaching services. Business coaching needs to be more structured and formal than mentoring.[citation needed]

Business coaches often help businesses grow by creating and following a structured, strategic plan to achieve agreed upon goals. Multiple organizations train professionals to offer business coaching to business owners who may not be able to afford large coaching firm prices.

Coaching is not a practice restricted to external experts. Many organizations expect their senior leaders and middle managers to coach their team members toward higher levels of performance, increased job satisfaction, personal growth, and career development. Those that do back up their expectations with training in coaching skills, access to feedback tools, and/or specific coaching behaviors described in their leadership competency models. Few link coaching activities to compensation, however, resulting in less coaching by managers

Involves working with leaders of small to medium-sized business, non-profit organizations, municipalities, and public institutions to:

• ·         Develop leadership and time management skills.
• ·         Learn how to balance work and personal life.
• ·         Increase productivity.
• ·         Increase market share.
• ·         Identify gaps and obstacles to success.
• ·         Increase customer satisfaction.
• ·         Improve other areas of the organization.

TOURISM INDUSTRY FACTS & FIGURES WORLDWIDE

Australian tourism continues to deliver, despite the many challenges, both in Australia and abroad.

Total tourism expenditure in Australia increased 5.0 per cent in nominal terms in 2011, a good result given the combined challenges of weak economic conditions outside Asia, and the strong Australian dollar. A series of events also hurt the industry, particularly early in 2011, including the Queensland floods, Cyclone Yasi and the Japanese tsunami.

Following a rise of 5.0 per cent in 2010, total visitor arrivals to Australia were steady in 2011. Australia’s most valuable inbound tourism market, China, again delivered strong growth of 19.4 per cent in 2011 in terms of arrivals, and 15.0 per cent growth in tourism exports.

More growth is on the horizon. The Tourism Forecasting Committee expects total visitor consumption to reach $102 billion in 2012–13, with international arrivals to reach over six million.

Domestic tourism expenditure continues to increase, but a competitive global market, a robust economy, and a strong Australian dollar means more Australians are choosing to holiday overseas.

This booklet gives a snapshot of one of Australia’s most important industries, one that adds $35 billion to our gross domestic product, accounts for eight per cent of our total exports, and directly employs just over half a million Australians.

In a fiercely competitive global marketplace, the Australian tourism industry has to work smarter than ever to deliver an internationally competitive product.

Our updated policy framework, Tourism 2020, is helping industry make this transition by providing the tools it needs to take advantage of the opportunities that Asia presents.

Under Tourism 2020, the Australian Government is working with industry and state and territory governments to assist the industry to achieve its potential of $140 billion in overnight spend by 2020.

Tourism 2020 focuses on:

• growing demand from Asia

• building competitive digital capability

• encouraging investment and implement regulatory reform

• ensuring the tourism transport environment supports growth

• increasing supply of labour, skills, and Indigenous participation

• building industry resilience, productivity and quality. 

Global visitor arrivals, 2012

Rank	Country	Arrivals (million)	Change on 2010(a) (%)	Share of global arrivals (%)
1	France	79.5	3.1	8.1%
2	United States of America	62.3	4.2	6.3%
3	China	57.6	3.4	5.9%
4	Spain	56.7	7.6	5.8%
5	Italy	46.1	5.7	4.7%
6	Turkey	29.3	8.5	3.0%
7	United Kingdom	29.2	3.2	3.0%
8	Germany	28.4	5.6	2.9%
9	Malaysia	24.7	0.4	2.5%
10	Mexico	23.4	4.9	2.4%
11	Austria	23.0	4.5	2.3%
12	Russia	22.7	11.8	2.3%
13	Hong Kong	22.3	10.9	2.3%
14	Ukraine	21.4	0.9	2.2%
15	Thailand	19.1	20.1	1.9%

The United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) noted that the global tourism industry continues to show its resilience in dealing with the many sharply negative shocks the industry has faced since 2000, including:

• September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001

• SARS in 2003

• Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and H1N1 pandemic in 2009

• Icelandic volcanic eruptions in 2010

• Japanese tsunami and nuclear plant meltdown in 2011.

The UNWTO estimates that global arrivals increased by 4.6% in 2011, and are forecast to increase by a further 3% to 4% in 2012. If this is realised, international arrivals worldwide would be over 1.0 billion this year.

Earlier, the GFC in 2009 led to a decrease in global international travel of around 3.9%, before rebounding strongly by 6.4% in 2010.

The GFC hit harder on global tourism receipts (spending), which declined 9.4% in 2009, but made a partial recovery in 2010 (increasing by 8.7%). Preliminary estimates indicate that global receipts will be strongly higher in 2011 (up 11.1%), to be well above pre-GFC levels.

Online Product Branding in Developing Countries

The biggest question that I happy with is how was this medium traditional medium, This change the diamond's of how consumers and brands interact and that big question is really fundamental about the  conventional model of advertising marketing is about the ad of modeling , like awareness, interest etc…going up to loyalty and here we talking about a medium that actually turn at set around and says , OK this is about acquiring consumers this is about involving and engaging  consumers and finally get down the actually closing the deals with consumers so these are new skills and part of it history is in privacy ... but does it relief brands yet, new model, new medium does it do people understand it yet I fear that is pretty much brand wagon right now it’s the in thing to do well while the you know 90 odd percent you know probably more 95 plus percent of advertising money is going to conventional media this is add-on and then you expect something really great out of it, what is the great thing get you expect out of it, do you expect more awareness, do you expect some brand building to happen people do start loving of brand because you on the internet medium  and I see around us marketers who are just in taken us by in this medium but not really knowing what to do with it and what to expect out of it and it’s a Tuff time just thinking about u know,OK what to do want I do who do I want to target and how I may to do it of those objectives most people’s not even thinking  for those objectives they just getting it into it because you know that’s the thing to do it’s a fastest growing media, my concern is really that is the industry itself as in the vendors side of this medium the agency side of this medium are the aware of how of this going to really pain out what is going to be model  on which consumers to really involved, engaged and it’s just something that everybody wants to  jumps into because it’s a growing media  so let’s make some box out it, capability, is there in enough capability in this industry who is going to teach whom you expect people to putting money into something and then you expect that ;OK I measure it for you and that’s about it but measurement towards what those are the burning questions for somebody like LG,IBM,Samsung,DELL and many others, who have to spend money on it how do you and can you build the brand a lot and not, it’s just going something opportunistic these are the things that concern , frankly all of us are learning I don’t think anybody has absolute answer on this.

Smartphone and Tablet Industry in US

Smartphone’s and tablets market share by OS

Smartphone’s:

·         Android was the most popular operating system at 43%, followed by iOS at 37% 57% of users reported using a 3G service, with only 27% using 4G

·         The top three activities performed on a smartphone were accessing local information (88%), searching for information (82%), and participating in social media/networking sites (76%)

·         Smartphone users preferred to use mobile apps over mobile websites for map information, social media updates, e‐mail, and banking information

·         Users preferred mobile websites for news, food/entertainment info, travel info, shopping info, and shopping

·         Two‐thirds of smartphone users (64%) want a site to load in less than 4 seconds

·         “Web page slow to load” top mobile frustration

Smartphone’s OS market share (2012 Figure):

Android from various carrier brands, becomes the king by distributing 104.8 million smartphones during the second quarter of 2012. The number is 68.1% of global smartphone market. 44.0% of the Android market is dominated by Samsung. The number of Samsung’s market is even bigger than the other seven producers of Android smartphone

Meanwhile, Apple manages to distribute 26 million iOS smartphones in the second quarter of 2012. The number means that Apple controls 16.9% of the market. Each of the two operating systems which once controlled the market, BlackBerry and Symbian, only control less than 5% of the world’s market today. BlackBerry owns 4.8% of the market while Symbian controls 4.4%.

Smartphone’s OS market share 2012

Operating System	Q2 2012 Shipments	Q2 2012 Market Share	Q2 2011 Shipments	Q2 2011 Market Share	Year-over-year Change
Android	104.8	68.1%	50.8	46.9%	106.5%
iOS	26.0	1609%	20.4	18.8%	27.5%
BlackBerry OS	7.4	4.8%	12.5	11.5%	-40.9%
Symbian	6.8	4.4%	18.3	16.9%	-62.9%
Windows Phone 7/ Windows Mobile	5.4	3.5%	2.5	2.3%	115.3%
Linux	3.5	2.3%	3.3	3.0%	6.3%
Others	0.1	0.1%	0.6	0.5%	-80.0%
Grand Total	154.0	100.0%	108.3	100.0%	42.2%

Source: IDC worldwide mobile phone tracker, August 8, 2012

Tablets:

Tablets OS market share (2012 Figure):

Global tablet market to 122.3 million units, up from its earlier forecast of 117.1 million units. The change, it adds, was driven by a strong competitive landscape, inclusive of rising Android tablet shipments and coupled with high demand for Apple iPad mini. In the latest forecast update of the Worldwide Quarterly Tablet Tracker, IDC also raised its 2013 forecast number to 172.4 million units, up from 165.9 million units. And by 2016, worldwide shipments should reach 282.7 million units, up from a previous forecast of 261.4 million units.

Tablet Operating system, market share Forecast and CAGR 2012-2016

Tablet OS	2012 market share	2016 market share	CAGR 2012-2016(%)
IOS	53.8%	49.7%	20.9%
Android	42.7%	39.7%	21.0%
Windows	2.9%	10.3%	69.2%
Other	0.6%	0.3%	7.7%
Grand Total	100.0%	100.0%	23.3%

Source: IDC worldwide quarterly tablet tracker. December 5, 2012

 In addition to increasing the unit totals for 2013, the report also sees IDC updating its operating system splits for the year to reflect Android's growing strength in the tablet market. Now expects Android's worldwide tablet share to increase from 39.8 percent in 2011 to 42.7 percent for the full year of 2012. It shared that during that same time, Apple's share will slip from 56.3 percent in 2011 to 53.8 percent in 2012. In the long term, IDC predicts that Windows-based tablets (including Windows 8 and Windows RT) will grab share from both iOS and Android, growing from 1 percent of the market in 2011 to 2.9 percent in 2012, on its way to 10.2 percent in 2016.