Here's looking at you in 3-D
The Times, London, reports from Mumbai:
Bollywood’s wealthiest mogul is poised to enter the booming business of transforming 2-D films into 3-D — with classics such as Casablanca expected to be given the full stereoscopic treatment.
Anil Ambani, who dominates the Indian film market but is also a leading Hollywood financier, will soon unveil a giant outsourcing centre in Mumbai that will be dedicated to the process of “dimensionalisation”.
The £25 million facility is the result of a partnership between his post-production business, Reliance MediaWorks, and In-Three, a Los Angeles-based specialist in 2-D to 3-D conversion.
Inside the new unit, 1,000 Indian technicians will be guided by a handful of American experts. In-Three has already given industry insiders a taste of what may be in store, holding private screenings of 3-D snippets of classics such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, 12 Angry Men and Casablanca. More:
From the Wall Street Journal:
After tying up with Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks last year, India’s Reliance ADA Group is eyeing a purchase of another Hollywood studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. But the Indian company isn’t willing to pay anything close to what MGM is seeking, a person familiar with the matter said.
MGM, which is struggling with $3.7 billion in debt stemming from its 2005 leveraged buyout, has extended first-round bids beyond this week as it tries to galvanize more interest in its assets, the person said.
People familiar with the talks said earlier this week that bids are in the $2 billion range, far below what MGM owes its lenders. Some could come in below $1.5 billion, they said. More
Reliance Industries’ Mukesh Ambani has emerged the wealthiest person in India — a net worth of $32 billion — on Forbes’ list of 100 Richest Indians.
Says Forbes: “The combined fortune of India’s 100 richest is $276 billion, almost one-fourth the country’s GDP. That is well below the total worth of $775 billion for the 100 richest Americans, but well ahead of the equivalent sum for China’s top 100. Although China has more billionaires–79 vs. India’s 52–India’s wealthiest are worth over $100 billion more than the $170 billion total net worth of their Chinese counterparts.”
London-based steel baron Lakshmi N Mittal with $30 billion, Anil Ambani with $17.5 billion, Azim Premji with $14.9 billion, Shashi and Ravi Ruia with $13.6 billion and KP Singh with $13.5 billion make up the top five billionaires on this year’s list.
1. Mukesh Ambani
2. Lakshmi Mittal
3. Anil Ambani
4. Azim Premji
5. Shashi & Ravi Ruia
6. Kushal Pal Singh
7. Savitri Jindal
8. Sunil Mittal
9. Kumar Birla
10.Gautam Adani
[Full list here]
Full story in Forbes
Joe Leahy in the Financial Times on the dispute between Asia’s richest siblings, the Ambani brothers:
Anil and Mukesh Ambani
Murli Deora, India’s oil minister, normally relaxes by playing bridge at the weekend with his wife and friends. But in recent weeks, a rather less genteel contest than that has been intruding on his free time.
Mr Deora was a close confidant of Dhirubhai Ambani, the rags-to-riches entrepreneur who built his Reliance polyester group into a corporate titan but died in 2002 without leaving a will. This sparked a succession war between his sons Anil and Mukesh, now Asia’s richest siblings.
Dropping into Mr Deora’s Mumbai home one weekend in June after his customary jog on the seafront, Anil Ambani complained to “uncle” about how he believed Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries was trying to corner the spoils of the KG Basin, a giant gas field discovered by the group off India’s east coast in 2000, says a person familiar with the matter.
Late last month, frustrated by suspicions that the minister was siding with his brother in the dispute, Anil Ambani went public. He used the podium of the annual meeting of one of his companies, Reliance Natural Resources, to lambast Mukesh’s Reliance Industries and the oil ministry.
The nationally televised onslaught – and the release of an earlier letter to Manmohan Singh, prime minister, that contained the same allegations – sent reverberations through the halls of power in New Delhi and has elevated the long-running Ambani succession war into an issue of national importance. More:
He might be fighting big brother, Mukesh Ambani in the Supreme Court, but Anil Ambani is on a roll with a dream deal done with Steven Spielberg’s Dreamworks. The story in BBC.
The film studio Dreamworks, co-founded by Steven Spielberg, is to receive $825m for film production, the studio’s Indian partner says.
Reliance ADA Group, run by Anil Ambani, is one of India’s biggest entertainment groups and a key player in Bollywood, India’s Hindi film industry.
Dreamworks agreed a joint venture with Mr Ambani in October last year.
The new studio will make films in the US, injecting large amounts of Indian cash into America’s film industry.
Hollywood director Steven Spielberg has made some of the biggest box office hits including ET, Schindler’s List and Jaws.
Mr Ambani is the world’s sixth richest man. more
More on the deal here and here.
Andrew Buncombe in the Independent:
Anil Ambani, one of the world’s richest men, had been due to travel in the helicopter that he routinely uses to avoid Mumbai’s notoriously gridlocked traffic. Then pebbles and gravel were discovered in the fueltank of his Bell 412 chopper. But, as officials from Mr Ambani’s company claimed that a plot to murder the tycoon by his business rivals had been uncovered, the engineer who found the gravel during a routine inspection, was tense and anxious. Police who questioned Bharat Borge and his fellow engineers did not believe he was behind the sabotage but his family could tell he was concerned.
As police continued their investigation, Mr Borge’s body was this week discovered alongside railtracks in the Vile Parle area of the city. Tucked inside his pocket was an apparent suicide note, addressed to the detective who had questioned him. “My parents have brought me up with the right values and I would never get involved in any wrong activity,” he wrote. A post-mortem examination concluded that he died after mutiple fractures while at least one witness said they saw the engineer step into the path of an oncoming train. More:
Reliance Industries chief Mukesh Ambani has been ranked the third-richest chief executive in the world in a list of 10 wealthiest CEOs compiled by Forbes magazine. Steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal, Anil Ambani and Sunil Mittal are the other Indians in the list.
Warren Buffett is the richest (value of stake $35.9 billion)
Mukesh Ambani / Reliance Industries: Value of stake $16.8 billion
Lakshmi Mittal / ArcelorMittal: Value of stake $13.2 billion
Anil Ambani / Reliance Communications, Reliance Power, Reliance Capital, Reliance Natural Resources: Value of stakes $9 billion
Sunil Mittal / Bharti Airtel: Value of stake $6.9 billion
Click here for the Forbes story
India Inc’s love song to Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi in the course of a business conference in Gujarat has caused consternation among Congress circles and a few red faces in the BJP as well. The central leadership of Modi’s own party has taken credit for Modi’s peformance. And the Congress has called the claims of Vibrant Gujarat bogus, warning that German industrialists too were enamoured of Adolf Hitler. But corporate India is determined to love Modi, seeing him as the leader India needs. Alistair Scrutton reports for Reuters:
Two powerful industrialists have pitched for Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi to be India’s next leader, a sign of how the controversial Hindu nationalist is gaining momentum going into this year’s elections.
Modi is a brilliant orator who has a reputation for battling corruption to bring development to Gujarat, but he is accused of turning a blind eye to the murder of hundreds of Muslims during riots in 2002 and is fiercely critical of Pakistan.
The statements by telecommunications tycoons Anil Ambani and Sunil Mittal were unusual in their frankness and reflect how many executives and members of the middle-classes clamour for someone like Modi to cut through red tape and improve the business climate.
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Lakshmi Mittal is no longer the richest Indian in the world. According to the latest list out by Forbes, that position now goes to Mukesh Ambani (photo). But the global financial crisis has hit the subcontinent hard — with the wealthiest Indians being 60 per cent less wealthy than they were a year ago. Naazneen Karmali has the story in Forbes.
These are painful times for India’s richest as the ongoing global turmoil drastically reshapes their fortunes. The country’s once soaring stock market fell 48% in the 12 months, the rupee depreciated 24% against the dollar and gross domestic product growth is expected to slow down to 7.5%, partly owing to double-digit inflation.
All of this conspired to knock 60% off the combined fortunes of the nation’s 40 wealthiest. Their total net worth fell $212 billion, to $139 billion, down from $351 billion a year ago.
Last year’s No. 1, U.K. resident Lakshmi Mittal, dropped $30.5 billion amid plunging steel prices, but he slips only a bit, to No. 2. Mukesh Ambani, who oversees petrochemicals giant Reliance Industries, grabs the top spot for the first time, despite losing $28.2 billion in the past year. His estranged brother, Anil, ranked third, is the biggest dollar loser, down $32.5 billion.
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The Indian government wasn’t interested, so OLPC partners with Reliance ADA Group to bring computers to India’s primary school kids. Nandini Lakshman in BusinessWeek:
Nicholas Negroponte has found it tough going in India. For years as the head of MIT’s Media Lab, the famed computer scientist promoted radical ways to use technology to transform society. His best-known idea is the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) program, a plan to make a simple, $100 laptop that would create a digitally literate generation in the hardscrabble classrooms of emerging-market nations. The laptop, now dubbed the XO, is finally being mass-produced in China.
In 2001, the computer scientist came to India to promote the Media Lab, but failed to impress New Delhi. Negroponte clearly fell off the India map, when then-Information Technology Minister Arun Shourie dismissed his efforts as “pedagogically suspect” and wanted more accountability. When Negroponte’s nonprofit One Laptop per Child foundation approached the Indian government in 2006, his project was again rebuffed by India’s then-Education Secretary, Sudeep Banerjee.
Two years later, Negroponte is back to open a new office in New Delhi and launch the OLPC program in India on Aug. 4.
More:
The latest on the war between the world’s richest brothers, Mukesh and Anil Ambani. In Tehelka, Veeshal Bakshi reports that Mukesh Ambani is pushing his agenda to silence Anil’s friends.
As Mukesh Ambani visited the Prime Minister’s Office and Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s home on Monday to counter demands by Samajwadi Party leader Amar Singh that would surely hurt his busness, it was clear that the Reliance Industries chairman wouldn’t easily let the government take sides in his latest feud with his younger brother Anil.
As the elder Ambani pressed flesh in the capital’s corridors of power, the buzz was that Anil now has a hotline to the Gandhi residence at 10, Janpath, thanks to his close links with Amar Singh and his party. Mukesh had dashed to New Delhi in his private jet after Amar Singh announced that his party would pressure the government to levy ‘windfall tax’ on private oil refineries that have gained unexpected wealth following the global oil price rise. If such a tax were indeed announced, it would directly hit RIL’s plans to set up the world’s biggest refinery complex in India.
The Ambani brothers — whose gigantic businesses together account for five per cent of India’s economic output — have come a long way since the 1990s, when they jointly worked the corridors of power under the leadership of their father, Dhirubhai, to demolish one business rival after another.
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Cash-rich Bollywood comes to the aid of cash-strapped Hollywood studios reports Dalya Alberge for The Times
Bollywood has met Hollywood at the Cannes Film Festival, with George Clooney, Tom Hanks and Brad Pitt signing rupee-spinning deals for big movie collaborations.
India produces more films than any other country, and sells more than four billion cinema tickets a year, far more than in America. Now one of its biggest companies is to become a significant Hollywood player, it was announced yesterday in Cannes.
Reliance Big Entertainment, part of a $100 billion (£50 billion) Indian conglomerate, is to invest in development funds for eight production companies owned by A-list stars: they include Nicolas Cage’s Saturn Productions, Jim Carrey’s JC 23 Entertainment, Clooney’s Smokehouse Productions, Hanks’s Playtone Productions and Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment.
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Amitabh Bachchan joins a growing legion of bloggers to write about his family, things he feels strongly about and as a platform to reply to his critics (including a swipe at filmstar-politician Shatrughan Sinha).
In one of his posts he talks about the Marathi-non Marathi controversy whipped up by Raj Thackeray, saying that ‘discrimination of any kind is not acceptable to me’.
Hosted by BigAdda (which is owned by good friend Anil Ambani) and just one week old, Big B’s blog is a super-duper hit with comments pouring in from ‘Poland to Pakistan’.
Check out the blog here
The Forbes list of billionaires is just out and the Indian billionaire club is thriving. Although China has the most number of new billionaires on The List (28), the wealth amassed by Indian billionaires is more than 3.5 times that of those in China.
India, incidentally, has 19 newbies on The List — with at least one (Sameer Gehlaut of India Bulls) below the age of 40.
And, finally, India has retained its position as Asia’s biggest source of billionaires — 53 of them with a combined wealth of $340.9 billion. India’s Fab Four — Lakshmi Mittal, Mukesh Ambani, Anil Ambani and K.P. Singh — retain their place in The List’s T20 (top 20).
Check out the complete list, edited by Luisa Kroll at Forbes:
After 13 years on top, Bill Gates is no longer the richest man in the world. That honor now belongs to his friend and sometimes bridge partner Warren Buffett.
Riding the surging price of Berkshire Hathaway stock, Buffett has seen his fortune swell to an estimated $62 billion, up $10 billion from a year ago.
Gates is now worth $58 billion and is ranked third richest in the world. He is up $2 billion from a year ago, but would have been as rich–or richer–than Buffett, had Microsoft not made an unsolicited bid for Yahoo! at the beginning of February. Mexican telecom mogul Carlos Slim Helú now ranks as the world’s second richest person with a net worth of $60 billion.
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In its annual power list, India Today mixes new names with old to come up with a list of those who matter most in the creation of a new India. Some of the names, Ratan Tata (at #1) and Mukesh Ambani (#2) are now standard bearers on the list. Anil Ambani inches his way up to #3.
Media barons continue to matter. Brothers Samir and Vineet Jain (#9) of the Times of India group, Raghav Bahl (#18) of TV18 and Prannoy and Radhika Roy (#22) of NDTV continue to be on The List, while Ronnie Screwvala (#24) of UTV is the new entrant.
Other names debuting on the list include former President APJ Abdul Kalam (#7), K.V. Kamath (#13), managing director of India’s largest private bank ICICI and Lalit Modi (#29), BCCI’s powerful vice president and the creator of the Indian Premier League.
Film stars continue to make the list with Shah Rukh Khan (#6) way ahead of Amitabh Bachchan (#16), Rajnikant (#28) and Aamir Khan (#38). And cricket, the other religion of India along with films, rules with Sachin Tendulkar (#25) and Mahendra Singh Dhoni (#35).
For a complete look at who’s on the list, and why, click here.
Economic Times has the PTI agency story on its front page
STEEL tycoon Lakshmi Niwas Mittal and the Ambani brothers are among the 10 wealthiest CEOs in the world, according to Forbes. Mr Mittal is ranked the second-wealthiest CEO, followed by Mukesh Ambani (6th), Anil Ambani (7th) and Wipro chief Azim Premji (9th). Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett tops the list with a fortune of $52 billion. Arcelor Mittal chief LN Mittal has a net worth of $32 billion, while Mukesh Ambani and Anil Ambani have fortunes of $20.1 billion and $18.2 billion, respectively. Chief of IT bellwether Wipro Azim Premji has a net worth of $17.1 billion.
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From the blog, Riding the Elephant by John Elliott, Fortune’s India correspondent
India has unsophisticated investors. I’m talking about stock market investors of course following the stock market crash, with Mumbai’s key Sensex index plummeting 19% from an all time and over-priced high of above 21,000 on January 8 to under 17,000 by Tuesday. Such a remark, judging from past Riding the Elephant experience, will generate a furious tirade of comments, especially from readers based in the United States who are always anxious to protect India’s reputation.
But how else can you explain a market which swings from such extremes. Last week it mobilized bids totaling an astronomic $180 billion for the $2.9 billion initial public offering launched by Anil Ambani’s Reliance Power (which has yet to produce a revenue stream). On Monday and Tuesday, it crashed, seemingly ignoring the country’s strong economic fundamentals. As Palaniappan Chidambaram, India’s finance minister, pointed out when he tried to calm nerves during the slide, the fundamentals are strong. The economy, he pointed out, is growing at around 9%, and the prime minister’s economic advisory council is forecasting 8.5% for 2008-09.
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Indian self-confidence is despite and in spite of its political class writes Namita Bhandare in Mint
Politicians aren’t known to be thin-skinned. Yet, even the thickest of this amazing breed must have noticed a serious image problem that just got worse this past one week.
In no particular order: Uttar Pradesh chief minister Maya memsaab had a birthday party—her own symbolic “let them eat cake” moment, with diamonds and a helicopter as gifts. Even as a shocked nation watched senior bureaucrats feed behenji her favourite cream cake in a spectacle of sycophancy came the news that one of New Delhi’s most awaited, and needed, expressways (to Gurgaon) was ready to roll but that the aam aadmi (common man) would have to wait.
The reason? No VIP was available to inaugurate this “very important road”. Despite a “people’s inauguration”, the expressway remains shut—it is now to be inaugurated by Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit and other significant politicians later this week.
Then there was the absolutely unedifying hullabaloo over the Bharat Ratna.
Randeep Ramesh on the rise of the Indian economy in The Guardian
It took one minute to sell all $3bn (£1.53bn) worth of shares to the public in India’s biggest share floatation. The buying frenzy of stock in Reliance Power will almost certainly see 48-year-old Anil Ambani overtake his older brother Mukesh to become the country’s richest man with a fortune of more than $60bn when the shares debut on the Bombay stock exchange later this month.
What is remarkable is that Indians have been buying into a company that has little more than a famous name, Reliance, and big ambitions. The soaring stockmarket is a symptom of India’s overflowing optimism. Little wonder that Gordon Brown, who arrives in the country tomorrow night, has decided to make India the second stop on his Asian tour.
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Anil Ambani speaks to Economic Times on powering India’s biggest IPO, his father, Dhirubhai Ambani and how he plans to celebrate
At 4.30 pm in Reliance Centre, headquarters of the ADAG group in Mumbai, Anil Ambani has run the course a few days ahead of the Mumbai Marathon — and in record time. So what does he have to say about India’s largest-ever IPO? “Gone in 60 seconds,” says Ambani Jr, walking around the room strutting his stuff (Rs 110,000 crore, no less). Dressed in ET-pink shirt, grey trousers and black moccasins, Anil Dhirubhai Ambani can barely hide his euphoria: “If you ask me, this is the beginning of the ADAG group,” he says, amidst congratulatory phone calls and smses.
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Asia Sentinel
Prosperity gets in the way of family and corporate relationships, writes Raju Bist
In the mid-1990s, when the Birla family, which ran India’s second-largest business group, was in the midst of a bitter division of assets, one young family member quipped that “blood is thicker than water. But profits are thicker than blood.” A decade later, the country’s fast-rising prosperity is causing even more confrontations.
Read the rest of the story
