Business
Step up lending for public infra, MSMEs: FM Sitharaman to banks – The Times of India
PUNE: Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday called upon banks and financial institutions with strong balance sheets to step up lending for public infrastructure, industry and the MSME sector.Addressing the Foundation Day event of Bank of Maharashtra, Sitharaman highlighted the critical role of banks amid growing global uncertainty. “The global environment has become increasingly unpredictable. The extent to which countries are affected depends on their exposure to these shocks and how well-prepared they are.”FM said despite the turbulence in the global economy, India showed resilience, supported by strong economic fundamentals and improved sovereign ratings from international agencies. She emphasised that India’s robust response to global challenges was not coincidental but driven by solid domestic demand and the inherent strength of its economy.Sitharaman also stressed the need for public sector banks to maintain professional management and a customer-centric approach. “Every complaint must be seen as an opportunity to improve, innovate and reinforce trust in the minds of the customers. Grievance redressal must go hand in hand with root cause analysis, systemic corrections in products, processes and conduct, besides a commitment to ensure the complaints do not recur.”At the event, department of financial services secretary M Nagaraju said the credit extended by banks to micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) would aid in their expansion, helping them cope with financial stress in distressed sectors. “Govt has been laying great emphasis on providing more capital to MSMEs. But banks should also provide more capital to the MSMEs, both for expansion and recovery from stress, if there is any,” he said.
Business
Noel Tata’s son Neville, Bhaskar Bhat inducted by Tata Trusts to board of Sir Dorabji Tata Trust: Report – The Times of India
Neville Tata has been appointed by Tata Trusts to the board of Sir Dorabji Tata Trust (SDTT). Neville Tata is the son of Tata Trusts chairman Noel Tata. Group veteran Bhaskar Bhat has also been inducted.This appointment strengthens Noel Tata’s position whilst elevating Neville, aged 32, to one of the most significant roles within the Tata organisation, positioning him for a substantial future career in the family enterprise, according to an ET report.During Tuesday’s meeting, the trustees amended Venu Srinivasan’s position from lifetime to a three-year term, adhering to new Maharashtra government regulations that limit lifetime trustee appointments, directly affecting Tata Trusts’ established governance structure.
Who are Neville Tata and Bhaskar Bhat?
Following his graduation from Bayes Business School, Neville commenced his career at Trent in 2016 in the packaged foods and beverages division. Subsequently, he took charge of Zudio, a value fashion retailer that has emerged as one of India’s rapidly expanding clothing retail chains.Neville currently serves on the boards of JRD Tata Trust, Tata Social Welfare Trust and RD Tata Trust. Sources indicate he might join Sir Ratan Tata Trust (SRTT), another significant trust that, alongside SDTT, controls over 51% of shares in Tata Sons, the group’s primary holding entity.Bhat, aged 71, graduated from IIT Madras and IIM Ahmedabad, and started his professional journey in 1978 at Godrej & Boyce as a management trainee, before transitioning to the Tata Watch Project, which subsequently evolved into Titan.Throughout his tenure as managing director from 2002 to 2019, spanning 17 years, he guided Titan’s diversification from watches into multiple segments including eyewear, jewellery, fragrances, accessories and sarees. Under his leadership, the company’s market value grew to approximately $13 billion, positioning it as the second-largest listed company in the Tata Group at that time.
A version of this article first appeared in the CNBC Property Play newsletter with Diana Olick. Property Play covers new and evolving opportunities for the real estate investor, from individuals to venture capitalists, private equity funds, family offices, institutional investors and large public companies. Sign up to receive future editions, straight to your inbox.
Billionaire Barry Sternlicht, chairman and CEO of Starwood Capital Group, is a legendary, legacy real estate investor. Brendan Wallace is an entrepreneur who co-founded Fifth Wall, a venture capital firm investing in property technology and decarbonizing real estate. The pair first met in the gym. Now, Wallace can say Sternlicht is a mentor – as well as a Fifth Wall investor – and Sternlicht jokes that Wallace is his trainer.
Together they gave CNBC Property Play a rare glimpse into how old-school commercial real estate investing is pivoting to a new tech-driven world order and how that new world order still relies on lessons learned in the past.
Here are some of the highlights from the conversation, edited for clarity and length:
On CRE investing
Sternlicht: We endured a 500 basis point, fairly rapid increase in rates, and most people who were invested had to pay some price for that, whether the yields on property went up or they weren’t properly hedged. Your costs went up, your expenses, and they drained a lot of cash flow from assets that might have gone into fixing the assets up. That’s behind us now, and there’s no doubt that interest rates are going down. … In May of next year, Jerome [Powell] will be out [as Federal Reserve Chairman], and nobody’s getting that job without agreeing to lower rates.
I think they should lower rates. I think inflation that we’re seeing is tariff related. It will continue. It’ll get worse, probably, in the fourth quarter, when the new inventories hit the shelves and the tariffs can no longer be ignored.
Wallace: The rate increases that Barry was mentioning, those impacted prop tech definitionally, because all tech companies, all loss-making businesses, rerated all at the same time. And at the same time, the demand from commercial real estate stopped.
I would say an overlay on top of it was also that a big part of where real estate companies were investing in the last four years was around decarbonization efforts, so trying to conform to new carbon neutrality laws … and anticipating this kind of wave of decarbonization. And I feel like with [President Donald] Trump‘s election, it kind of felt like they got a hall pass, certainly for four years.
On AI and data centers
Sternlicht: We’ve probably got $20 billion dedicated to [the data center] space. I think it’s a different issue than you think. Most of us don’t build until we get a hyperscaler lease. So we get the lease from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle. What we’re watching now is the credit worthiness of the tenant, and particularly Oracle, because Oracle is doing all these deals back-ended to [ChatGPT], and Chat is a startup that doesn’t make money and requires hundreds of billions of dollars to grow to the scale they want to be.
There’s no question AI is going to change the entire world and do it much faster than anything we’ve ever seen before, much faster than the internet, certainly faster than the Industrial Revolution. That is terrifying to me. I mean, I’m not so complacent. I look at … how we spend money, and what I can do with AI agents that I do with humans today, and it’s terrifying for the people. I think we have to let people go, right? Jobs of 15 people can be done with a chatbot that costs me $36 a month.
Wallace: I was trying to trace all these pretty Byzantine and somewhat incestuous commitments that are happening between the large tech companies, between the digital infrastructure providers, and it’s actually very hard to trace who’s going to ultimately pay for it all, but ultimately it has to be paid for in the economy.
The way to just acid test whether it makes sense is if you looked at the amount of AI compute that will be required to fill all the data centers that are in production or have been announced to go into production, and then you assume that the tech companies have to make some profit on top of that to justify it, which they’re not today, but let’s assume they have to. Take any margin you want, assume that’s the revenue that’s then therefore flowing to large language models and AI. What percent of U.S. GDP would that be today if you ran that math? My fear is that it might be like 120% of U.S. GDP.
On their next bets
Sternlicht: We’re heavily investing in Europe, actually. Not here. They’ve done the stimulus package. They have low rates. They don’t have, really, inflation. They don’t have tariffs. It’s amazing, having returned from Europe and the Middle East, I can buy everything cheaper in Europe than I can here now.
Wallace: New York City. People overestimate the durability of these political vibe shifts. Within two years of electing Trump, we elected [Zohran] Mamdani to run New York, and I just think these things move dialectically. Over the long term, New York is going to be super valuable. So if I were a betting person, I didn’t have to make a return in the next four years, I would bet on New York.
Grocery price inflation has slowed in some good news for consumers as retailers ramp up festive deals ahead of Christmas, figures show.
Supermarket prices were still 4.7% higher than a year ago in October, but this was down from September’s 5.2%, according to market research firm Worldpanel by Numerator, formerly Kantar.
Spending on deals climbed by 9.4% to just under 30% of all grocery purchases, while spending on full-priced goods rose by just 1.8%.
Fraser McKevitt, head of retail and consumer insight at Worldpanel, said: “Christmas ads are hitting our screens and the race to the big day is on in the supermarket sector.
“Retailers are very alive to the financial struggles that some households are facing, not least ahead of this year’s Budget.
“They’re eager to show how they’re offering shoppers value for money, putting the emphasis on price cuts rather than multibuy offers.”
Despite tightening belts, Worldpanel is predicting a new sales record for retailer premium lines this year, suggesting it has the potential to hit more than £1 billion in December.
Mr McKevitt said: “It’s important to remember that shoppers often look for great value and quality, not just the cheapest product.
“At Christmas especially people want to treat themselves and throughout the cost-of-living crisis we’ve seen them turning to retailers’ premium own label lines to do that in a way that’s more affordable.”
Online remains the fastest growing part of the grocery market and spending on home delivery rose by 11% over the month.
On average, households who use online grocery now buy three shops a month.
Ocado posted a new record share for the 12 weeks to November 2, hitting 2.1%, as it remained the fastest-growing grocer for the third month in a row.
Tesco and Lidl both added half a percentage point of share to their market positions, with Lidl boosting sales by 10.8% over the 12 weeks to take its share to 8.2% and Tesco now accounting for 28.2% of the market with a sales increase of 5.9%.
Sainsbury’s achieved growth of 5.2% to gain market share of 15.7%.
Noel Tata’s son Neville, Bhaskar Bhat inducted by Tata Trusts to board of Sir Dorabji Tata Trust: Report – The Times of India
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