Billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries has started testing WhatsApp to connect customers to grocery stores, days after Facebook decided to invest $5.7 billion in digital assets controlled by the company. JioMart, an e-commerce venture of Reliance Retail, “has already started interacting with customers on WhatsApp for grocery orders” in Navi Mumbai, Thane and Kalyan, Credit Suisse said in a report.

“The customer initiates the interaction on WhatsApp, checks out the grocery order on JioMart webpage, gets connected with a retail store on WhatsApp and then customer picks up the order from Kirana and pays in cash,” it said, adding the model is likely on delivery and completion of the transaction on one app.

 The Facebook deal will help Ambani set up a digital platform to take on Amazon and Walmart’s Flipkart in an e-commerce market that KPMG says is likely to grow to $200 billion by 2027. The deal benefits Facebook via “partnership with the largest retail player in India, where partnership starts with grocery, and later could be extended to medicine distribution, fashion and lifestyle stores, food delivery, etc,” Credit Suisse said in a report.

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Shares of Reliance Industries (RIL) gained 4 per cent to Rs 1,475 on the BSE on Monday in the early morning deal. The stock has surged 19 per cent in the past four trading days after the company announced $5.7 billion equity deal with Facebook. In comparison, the benchmark S&P BSE Sensex has gained 4.1 per cent during the same period.

RIL on Wednesday, April 22, 2020 announced that Facebook would invest Rs 43,547 crore ($5.7 billion) in the company’s wholly-owned subsidiary Jio Platforms to expand its presence in India.

  A sharp rally in stock price has seen the market captialisation (market-cap) of RIL increase by Rs 1.5 trillion in four trading days. The company’s market-cap stood at Rs 9.35 trillion in the intra-day trade today, from Rs 7.83 trillion on April 21, 2020, the exchange data shows.

The stock hit a two-month high today and has recovered 68 per cent from its last month low of Rs 876 touched on March 23, in an intra-day deal. RIL’s m-cap touched an all-time high level of Rs 10.17 trillion on December 19, 2019 on closing level basis.

This deal could have far-reaching benefits for Jio Platforms, presenting a plethora of opportunities in its fiber and digital business endeavors. The partnership would accelerate RJio’s digital monetization drive; management’s renewed focus on digital ecosystem would open up multiple new e-commerce opportunities as the company plans to leverage JioMart and WhatsApp to enable small Indian kirana stores to transact digitally with their customers.

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Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday conveyed to chief ministers that the country will have to give importance to the economy as well as to continue the fight against coronavirus.

The prime minister interacted with chief ministers as in a video conference and highlighted the importance for states to enforce prescribed guidelines strictly in the hotspots, the government said in a statement.

 The prime minister also underlined that the lockdown has “yielded positive results as the country has managed to save thousands of lives in the past one and a half months.”

ALSO READ: Coronavirus LIVE: 4 CMs tell Modi they want lockdown extended after May 3

“Prime Minister said that the country has seen two Lockdowns till now, both different in certain aspects, and now we have to think of the way ahead. He said that as per experts, the impact of coronavirus will remain visible in the coming months,” the statement added.

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The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) will open a special liquidity window of Rs 50,000 crore to ease pressure on mutual funds, which are facing liquidity strains due to heightened volatility in capital markets in the wake of the Covid-19 outbreak.

The liquidity strains have intensified amid redemption pressures related to the closure of some debt MFs and potential contagious effects. The stress was, however, confined to the high-risk debt MF segment at this stage; the larger industry remained liquid, RBI said in a statement on Monday.

 Banks will draw funds under the Special Liquidity Facility-Mutual Fund (SLF) exclusively for meeting the liquidity requirements of MFs by extending loans. Bank could also make outright purchase of investment-grade corporate bonds, commercial papers (CPs), debentures and certificates of Deposit (CDs) held by MFs.

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Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who has made absolutely no secret of his love for cyrptocurrency over the years, says Bitcoin for him is like poetry.

Praising ‘The Bitcoin’ whitepaper that was published in 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto (a name used by the presumed pseudonymous person or the group who developed bitcoin) that outlines what Bitcoin is and how it works, Dorsey said he sees ample opportunity for Bitcoin to bring about a sea change in the world.

The Bitcoin whitepaper is “one of the most seminal works of computer science in the last 20-30 years. Bitcoin is like poetry,” he said during an Artificial Intelligence (AI) podcast with MIT research scientist Lex Fridman via The Daily Hodl.

“I think it was smart not to do it anonymous, not to do it as a real identity, but to do it as a pseudonym because I think it builds tangibility and a little bit of empathy that this was a human or a set of humans behind it. There’s this natural identity that I can imagine,” explained Dorsey.

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Cricket Australia (CA) chief executive Kevin Roberts on Thursday hinted at a possible change in dates for the T20 World Cup, saying “we are exploring all other options” to stage the event, which is originally scheduled for October-November.

Like other sports, cricketing action too has come to a complete halt due to the Covid-19 pandemic with the IPL indefinitely postponed and the T20 World Cup, to be held in Australia, facing an uncertain future.

“Cricket Australia is working closely with the ICC, the Local Organising Committee and the Australian government so we have a comprehensive understanding of exactly what it will take to be able to play the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2020 in October in Australia as planned,” Roberts said.

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State Bank of India (SBI), the country’s largest lender, has set a target of disbursing Rs 700 crore to MSMEs in the Mumbai circle by the end of June, to help them tide over liquidity crisis due to the Covid-19 lockdown.

Among all banks, SBI controls a market share of 22 per cent in the MSME lending.

 “SBI will boost flow of credit to MSMEs (micro, small and medium enterprises) in this challenging period by reassessing their working capital limit and also by extending Covid-19 emergency loans.

“Overall, we expect to lend Rs 700 crore to MSMEs in four districts of Mumbai circle — Mumbai, Thane, Palghar and Raigad — by the end of June,” the World Trade Centre said in a statement quoting Suresh Nair, deputy general manager (SMEs and financial inclusion) at SBI, as saying after a webinar.
 

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The ICC Chief Executives Committee on Thursday unanimously agreed to revamp the Future Tour Programs (FTP) till 2023, conceding that the “scale and complexity” of getting cricket started again “cannot be underestimated” in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.
 
The CEC meeting, held via tele-conference, decided that a decision on the World Test Championship (WTC) and the proposed ODI league, scheduled in June, can be taken at a later date. However, it is a given that the WTC final is unlikely to be held in June, 2021 as per the current FTP cycle and a four-month lag is expected.

ICC Test championship points table
 
But the T20 World Cup is on course even though Cricket Australia CEO Kevin Roberts said that his board is ready for any eventuality.
 
“There was agreement that the disrupted FTP programme would need to be collectively reviewed through to 2023 with a view to rescheduling as much of the cricket that has been postponed due to coronavirus as possible,” the ICC said in a statement.
 
Already, England’s tour of Sri Lanka stands postponed along with Australia’s tour of New Zealand.
 
Pakistan and the West Indies’ tours during the English summer also look to be in serious doubt. In fact, the West Indies’ tour is all but postponed.

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Serving soldiers, sailors and airmen of the three defence services, and retired veterans and their families who draw pensions, will bear the brunt of the government’s decision.

The salary freeze will affect the military’s 1,500,000 serving men and women — 1,265,000 in the Army, 83,500 in the Navy and 155,000 in the Air Force.

Meanwhile, the freeze in pension hike will affect 2,587,000 military pensioners and about 600,000 civilians drawing defence pensions. The decision does not violate the “one rank, one pension” principle because pensions have been frozen across the board. Readmore

Facebook and Reliance Jio hit the headlines early Wednesday morning, in a break from the daily lockdown news. Mark Zuckerberg announced in a Facebook post that the technology giant will acquire a 9.99 per cent stake in Jio Platforms Ltd (JPL) through a fresh issue of shares worth Rs 43,574 crore. The deal values JPL—the holding company of Reliance Jio — at an enterprise value Rs 4.62 trillion.

JPL’s equity value works out to Rs 4.36 trillion after Facebook’s investment, making it the fifth most valuable company in the country, behind its parent Reliance Industries (RIL), Tata Consultancy Services, Hindustan Unilever, and HDFC Bank.

 Considering the market value of RIL and JPL, the Street is valuing RIL’s remaining but core businesses of refining and petrochemicals and others such as retail at a lesser number of Rs 4.28 trillion. This makes JPL more valuable than the rest of RIL.

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