Jet fuel price hiked to Rs 1.12 lakh per kilolitre from 1.08 lk/kl — check details here

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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Indian oil companies on Wednesday hiked jet fuel or aviation turbine fuel (ATF) price to Rs 1.12 lakh per kilolitre from Rs 1.08 lakh per kilolitre in Delhi for domestic airlines. The new prices are effective from February 1.

As per Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) data for the top four metro cities, jet fuel in Delhi is priced at Rs 1,12,356.77 per kilolitre and for Mumbai at Rs 1,11,246.61 per kiloliter. In Kolkata and Chennai, the price stands at Rs 1,19,239.96 and Rs 1,16,922.56 per kilolitre, respectively.

Jet Fuel Price Hike | Jet fuel (ATF) price hiked to ₹1.12 Lk/kL from ₹1.08 Lk/kL in Delhi#JetFuel pic.twitter.com/fgMAFDCfeE

— CNBC-TV18 (@CNBCTV18Live) February 1, 2023

This price hike will add extra burden on airlines for whom fuel makes for almost 40 percent of the operating cost.

The ATF price is revised on the first of every month based on the average rate of international benchmark and foreign exchange rates.

Meanwhile, oil prices climbed on Wednesday due to weakness in the dollar that fell on signs of slowing inflation in the United States, easing fears that the world’s largest oil user may face a recession because of further interest rate hikes.

Also Read:Jet fuel price cut to Rs 1.08 lakh per kilolitre in Delhi — check details here

Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

3 Mins Read

Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

PayPal to lay off 7% of its workforce to cut costs

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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PayPal Holdings Inc said on Tuesday it is planning to cut 7% of its workforce, or about 2,000 employees, the latest in a string of fintech firms to be hit by the economic slowdown.

“While we have made substantial progress in right-sizing our cost structure, and focused our resources on our core strategic priorities, we have more work to do,” said PayPal’s Chief Executive Dan Schulman in a statement.

The move to keep a tight lid on costs comes against the backdrop of decades-high inflation hitting the purchasing power of consumers who also have to contend with the threat of a looming recession.

Shares of the payments firm were up about 2.4 percent in afternoon trading.

Also read: 78 percent Indian workers uneasy about job security amid layoffs: Survey

In November, PayPal had cut its annual revenue growth forecast in anticipation of a broader economic downturn and said it did not expect much growth in its U.S. e-commerce business in the holiday quarter.

Also read: From Jeff Bezos to Paypal co-founder, tech billionaires are trying to reverse ageing

Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

3 Mins Read

Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

Auto Sales January 2023 highlights | Volvo Eicher see sales jump 32%, Royal Enfield grows 27%

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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Auto sales figures for January 2023 are expected to be announced today, February 1, 2023. Car sales in India are likely to register healthy growth in the past month amid a healthy order book and increased production, a Nomura report has suggested. The research agency expects car, or passenger vehicle (PV), demand to remain skewed towards sports utility vehicles (SUVs) and premium variants.

According to the Nomura research, car volumes are likely to go up 21 percent year-on-year (YoY), while the medium and heavy commercial vehicles (MHCVs) are expected to rise 26 percent YoY. It suggested that two-wheeler demand may weaken and dive 28 percent from its peak in January 2018.

Among original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), Maruti Suzuki is likely to see its total volumes increase 13 percent at 1.74 lakh in January 2023 as against 1.54 lakh units in the same month last year.

Tata Motors, on the other hand, is likely to see its volumes grow 10 percent YoY at 84,000 versus 76,200 units. Mahindra Auto’s total volumes are expected to grow 35 percent in January 2023 at 63,000 units compared to last year’s 46,800 units.

Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

3 Mins Read

Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

Twitter makes first interest payment on Elon Musk buyout debt: Report

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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Twitter Inc has made its first interest payment on a loan that banks provided to help finance billionaire Elon Musk’s purchase of the social media company last year, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Twitter paid about $300 million to a group of banks last week, one of the sources said, confirming an earlier Bloomberg story.

The financing was led by Morgan Stanley, Bank of America Corp and Barclays PLC .

The banks declined to comment, while Twitter and Musk did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.

The sources did not want to identified because the details of the payment are not public.

The banks providing $13 billion in financing last year for Tesla CEO Musk’s acquisition of Twitter Inc abandoned plans to sell the debt to investors because of uncertainty around the social media company’s fortunes and losses, Reuters reported citing people familiar with the matter.

Also Read: New Twitter whistleblower says privacy lapses continued into Musk era

Morgan Stanley’s Chief Financial Officer Sharon Yeshaya told Reuters this month the bank’s mark-to-market losses on corporate loans include debt to Twitter.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Musk’s team has been exploring using as much as $3 billion in new fundraising to help repay some of the $13 billion in debt tacked onto Twitter Inc for his buyout of the company, citing people familiar with the matter.

Also Read | Twitter layoffs: More job cuts likely, employee count may slip below 2,000, says report

Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

3 Mins Read

Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

Budget 2023: The stocks to watch out for during the Finance Minister’s speech

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will present her Union Budget 2023 on February 1 at 11 AM. The Budget this time is expected to focus on increase in capex for roads and railways.

There is an expectation of a 10-15 percent hike in spending for roads and railways to Rs 2.1 lakh crore. This could bring to the limelight stocks like Larsen & Toubro, IRB Infrastructure Developers, Ashoka Buildcon along with smaller names like KNR Constructions.

Railways is also a key focus area for the government. In the current financial year, the railways had a budgeted spend of Rs 1.37 lakh crore that is expected to rise to Rs 1.6 lakh crore for the next financial year. The stocks to watch would be names like RVNL, Jindal Steel and Power and Siemens.

Along with L&T, higher infrastructure spends could mean more orders for companies like ABB India and Thermax.

Read Here | Budget 2023 needs to be micro-focused on capex and infrastructure spending: USISPF

Within defence, the capital outlay on defence services was Rs 1.52 lakh crore in the current financial year and it’s expected to rise to Rs 1.78 lakh crore in the next. A broad government defence push would aid stocks like Hindustan Aeronautics, Bharat Forge and Bharat Electronics.

The next sector to watch is power as the focus shifts to growth in renewables and energy transition. Clarity is expected on the incentives for hydrogen missions and coal gasification. However, the expected beneficiaries are Reliance Industries, NTPC, and Tata Power.

Any incremental incentives or subsidies for electric vehicles could boost names like Tata Motors.

The Finance Ministry will move ahead with the already-announced and planned privatisation of State-owned companies in the next fiscal, and the chances of new addition to that list of CPSEs in the Budget for 2023-24 is unlikely.

Read Here | Budget 2023 Expectations Highlights: IMA puts forward demands ahead of budget presentation

However, keep an eye out for the privatisation candidates. Brokerage firm Jefferies says: IDBI Bank and Container Corporation of India (CONCOR) are in the relatively advanced stage of the process and could conclude in next financial year.

Finally, since it is the final Budget before the general elections, any populist measures are to be watched for in the consumption space. Additional rural schemes similar to Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005 or MNREGA, minimum support price (MSP) hikes could be expected which will result in more money in the hands of rural and low-income generating people. This would benefit consumption names like Hindustan Unilever, Dabur, Britannia etc.

Follow CNBC-TV18’s live coverage on Budget 2019 here

For our exclusive coverage and all budget-related stories, click here

Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

3 Mins Read

Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

ChatGPT owner OpenAI launches ‘imperfect’ tool to detect AI-generated text

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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OpenAI, which released the viral ChatGPT chatbot last year, unveiled a tool that’s intended to help show if text has been authored by an artificial intelligence program and passed off as human.

The tool will flag content written by OpenAI’s products as well as other AI authoring software. However, the company said “it still has a number of limitations — so it should be used as a complement to other methods of determining the source of text instead of being the primary decision-making tool.”

In the Microsoft Corp.-backed company’s evaluations, only 26 percent of AI-written text was correctly identified. It also flagged 9 percent of human-written text as being composed by AI.

The tool, called a classifier, will be available as a web app, along with some resources for teachers, the company said in a statement Tuesday. The popularity of ChatGPT has given rise to authorship concerns as students and workers use the bot to create reports and content and pass it off as their own. It’s also spurred worries about the ease of auto-generated misinformation campaigns.

“While it is impossible to reliably detect all AI-written text, we believe good classifiers can inform mitigations for false claims that AI-generated text was written by a human: for example, running automated misinformation campaigns, using AI tools for academic dishonesty, and positioning an AI chatbot as a human,” OpenAI said in a blog post.

Since the release of ChatGPT in November, teachers in particular have been struggling to cope. Students quickly realized that the tool could generate term papers and summarize material, albeit while occasionally inserting glaring errors.

Also Read:Chinese search giant Baidu to launch ChatGPT-style bot

Earlier this month, a Princeton University student named Edward Tian released an app called GPTZero that he said he programmed over New Year’s to detect AI writing. Ethan Mollick, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School developed an AI policy for his classes, which allows students to use ChatGPT as long as they provide a description of what they used the program for and how they used it.

New York City’s public schools have banned using ChatGPT and so has the International Conference on Machine Learning, except in certain cases. The conference ethics statement noted that “papers that include text generated from a large-scale language model (LLM) such as ChatGPT are prohibited unless this produced text is presented as a part of the paper’s experimental analysis.”

Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

3 Mins Read

Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

Wall Street gains over 1% as traders await the Federal Reserve’s rate hike decision

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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A gauge of global stocks advanced on Tuesday as it closed out a strong month while US Treasury yields fell as investors assessed economic data and earnings reports ahead of a run of central bank policy announcements.

On Wall Street, US stocks rallied and closed higher, reversing declines in equity futures after data showed labor cost growth in the fourth quarter was the smallest in a year, at 1 percent, even in a tight labor market. Other data showed consumer confidence eased in January, as inflation expectations for the next 12 months climbed to 6.8 percent from 6.6 percent last month.

The Federal Reserve is widely expected to raise interest rates by 25 basis points (bps) at the conclusion of its two-day policy meeting on Wednesday. Investors will closely monitor comments from Fed Chair Jerome Powell following the announcement for clues on the path of monetary policy.

“Especially ahead of a Fed press conference, something like this equity market rally is kind of explicitly against what they want, and they have been pretty clear the market rallying on what they expect the Fed to do is counter-productive,” said Ross Mayfield, investment strategist at Baird in Louisville, Kentucky.

“We do feel like we’ve gotten a bit ahead of ourselves here even if we are closer to the end of the Fed hiking cycle than the beginning.”

The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 368.95 points, or 1.09 percent, to 34,086.04, the S&P 500 gained 58.83 points, or 1.46 percent, to 4,076.6, and the Nasdaq Composite added 190.74 points, or 1.67 percent, to 11,584.55.

The S&P 500 closed up 6.2 percent for the month, its first January gain since 2019, while the Nasdaq surged 10.7 percent for its biggest percentage gain for the month of January since 2001.

Interest rate announcements from the Bank of England and the European Central Bank are scheduled for Thursday, with both seen as likely to hike rates by 50 basis points.

Markets will also grapple with a host of US economic data this week, culminating in Friday’s payrolls report for January. Investors see signs of weakening in the labor market as a key factor in bringing down high inflation. Other data this week include gauges of the manufacturing and services sectors.

In addition, more than 100 S&P 500 companies, including market heavyweights Apple Inc, Amazon.com Inc and Google parent Alphabet, are scheduled to report results this week.

Despite the strong equity rally, Caterpillar and McDonald’s both lost ground on Tuesday following their quarterly results. However, Exxon Mobil rose after posting a $56 billion net profit for 2022.

European shares retreated ahead of the central bank meetings to end the month on a down note, but still notched their biggest January percentage gain since 2015. Economic data for the euro zone showed slight growth for the fourth quarter, but further weakness is expected this year.

The pan-European STOXX 600 index lost 0.26 percent, and MSCI’s gauge of stocks across the globe gained 0.72 percent. MSCI’s index was on pace for its biggest January percentage gain since 2019.

Benchmark US 10-year notes were down 3.5 basis points to 3.51 percent in the wake of the data, after hitting a two-week high of 3.57 percent on Monday.

In currencies, the US dollar index, poised for a fourth month of declines, fell 0.17 percent, with the euro up 0.22 percent to $1.08.

Oil prices recovered from earlier lows, as US crude settled up 1.2 percent at $78.87 per barrel and Brent settled at $84.49, down 0.48 percent on the day.

Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

3 Mins Read

Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

Maharashtra community health officials to go on strike today

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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Community health officials posted in rural areas of Maharashtra will go on a strike on Wednesday for various demands including a permanent government job, sources said on Tuesday.

Their other demands include a reduction in workload, allotment of wages on time and insurance by the state government.

Community health officers (CHOs) work in rural areas at primary health centres. They are currently working on a contract. Although their contracts get renewed, CHOs have now demanded to make them permanent employees of the state government, sources said.

The one-day strike will affect the basic check-up of patients for cold, cough, fever and routine maternal visits that are scheduled for Wednesday, a government doctor said.

”The state government used to give a 5 per cent increase in monthly wages every year to CHOs but it is not implemented since 2017. The government should clear those dues,” he said, adding they want to be inducted as permanent employees of the government and given a ”B’ grade pay scale.

Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

3 Mins Read

Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

V S Mani’s GD Prasad on being a former ad man, Shark Tank, personal branding

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

Listen to the Article (6 Minutes)

Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

3 Mins Read

Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow