India Inc. Meltdown Impact

India Inc. is cruising slow but steadily as the global slowdown has dampened the hiring prospects, causing it's outlook to hit lowest ever.According to a survey only 19 per cent of the employers are showing positive recruitment plans. There seems to be a considerable decrease of 24 per cent points quarter-on-quarter and 27 per cent year-on-year.

Employers in India report the second strongest hiring intentions globally, next to Peru. The situation is unclear;the amount of damage done to the world economy is uncertain and the clear picture can come up only in next 5-6 months time.

East India has the strongest hiring plans with a net employment outlook of 20 per cent followed by the South India at 19 per cent. However, the weakest hiring plans are surfacing in West and North India at 18 per cent only.

Analysis shows that mining, construction and manufacturing sectors can expect the most active hiring environment. While Wholesale and Retail sector can get the worst hit with a net employment outlook of 11 per cent.

Though global slowdown has affected world's economy the positive sign is that India and China are surviving it relatively well with the latter being limited to -1 per cent to the expected growth rate.

Visit to BIEC Automation Fair

Dev has an interesting article.

http://spearheadatbiec.blogspot.com/2008/12/fun-at-work.html

Here is an excerpt:

“Dev, you and Krithi get ready for the Automation Trade Fair on 10th December at the BIEC”. Those were the first words of SB when he stepped into office on Monday, 8th December.

Believe me, I was on my foot and said, “Yes Sir”. I found out the names of the participating companies, didn’t print it though. I got the cab booked (AC – Tavera); after all we were representing Spearhead Intersearch.

So 10th December it was and we were there at the entrance. It was a fair where around 500 companies from automation and engineering sector were to showcase their products and services. Krithi, a goddess who just came down to earth in a black salwar suit was the centre of attraction and the god himself was just making the girls go crazy in light purple shirt and pitch black trousers.

The setup in BIEC was huge. Sorry, I don’t have any pictures to support the last line but I am telling you, it was indeed a great show. You could actually see faces from almost every part of the world standing in their respective stalls, all looking enthusiastic and charged up (They had to be, it was 11 AM in morning) showcasing all kinds of components and equipments used in factories and automobiles.

However, for us it was a nightmare. I am an electronics engineer and Krithi I believe is also the same and here we are in the middle of Pumps, Motors, Shafts, Belts, Screws, Filters etc etc etc. I always told my dad that I wanted to be a Mechanical Engineer but he never listened to me (Sorry dad. I just pulled you unnecessary into this). We could see people in front of us, we could see them staring at us but we were still thinking as to where and how should we start. Now the famous lines comes into play, Where There Is a Will There Is a Way (Oh!! that rhymed...hai Na? Sometimes I think that I should have been a poet...haha)

Anyways, let the story continue. So we took a round of the entire hall and decided that it’s time to attack the Germans. We were actually looking for faces. I don’t know whether you would agree to me or not, but I think that one can easily make out from the face of the person that whether he is a CEO or MD or someone else and this works with me when relating faces to roles. We were bang on target from the beginning as we bumped into one CEO and then into an MD. Believe me; talking to them is far more knowledgeable and fruitful rather than speaking to some company representative. So we were doing well, actually very well indeed.

There were mostly German companies who have some distributor in India. Most of the Indian partners or subsidiaries were pretty new to the Indian industry. When asked about the plans of expansion almost everyone had one common answer, “This recession has put a halt on our plans of expansion. Maybe in the next 1 year we would think of coming to Indian markets as they hold great opportunities”. Everyone actually praised the Indian markets and still India is sometimes referred to as 3rd world country, strange, isn’t it? We got to speak to lot of people, some were even themselves looking for change (ya ya...dont worry, I have their names and numbers).
We were at our peak of BD when suddenly Krithi’s sandals gave up; I guess it had enough of walking so it just snapped. But that did not stop Krithi from walking. She did not look down or even back down. Spearhead spirit is just great. We then went to other stalls. We also met the officials of a company from Taiwan. They were good, but believe me after we spoke to them I am actually planning to open an institute and name it as Can You Teach Me English? You won’t believe, I had to bend down, fist to match his height and then I had to reduce my rate of speech from 120 wpm to almost 30 wpm. It was a challenging thing to do and you know Dev and Krithi, we are born to take challenges. Anyways, we finally took a break and had lunch at the food court there, Executive Non-Veg meal and a Chicken Club sandwich. It was good. Could have been better if they would have used some extra pieces of chicken. Well, I guess the chicken sale also has taken a hit in this recession period and the chickens have reduced their egg laying capacity. “You don’t give us food, we won give you eggs”, that’s what the chickens must be saying.
The post lunch session was also good for us. We met lot of officials. Showcased Spearhead Intersearch in the best possible professional way. Gave out lots of visiting cards and also collected lots of them. I would say it was a good day. Lot of work done. Lots of contacts made. We may not be able to target them right now, but 6 months down the lane we sure would have a good chance of healthy business with them.

Overall, it was a good exposure for both of us. We have two pictures that we took when we were out of the halls. Actually were so busy working, we actually forgot taking pictures to make this more illustrious. Anyways, something is better than nothing.

Tata will top car market share growth

By 2013,the global market share growth of India's Tata brand cars will be the highest among all brands,says a study by leading global market Intelligence firm US basedGlobal Insight.
The study prepared for the Indian automative industry lobby Xociety if Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM) says tgat by 2013, Tata brand light vehicles will double their global market share from 0.6 per cent to 1.2 per cent - a gain of 0.6 per cent.
The second fastesst growing car brand will be the Chinese brand chery,the market share of which will grow from 0.6 per cent - the same as that of the Tata brand now - to one per cent by 2013.
India's maruti brand too will see an increase in its global market shar from one per cent now to 1.1 per cent by 2013.
Apart from these brands the other brand that will see a big rise in market share is the French Renault.It is predictedd to gain 0.3 per cent share from 3.1 per cent now to 3.4 per cent by 2013.
Other gainers would be the Japanese brand Nissan,German brand BMW and AudiJapanese brand Mitshubishi,Czech Brand Skoda and Chinese brand Wuling.
Market study says that Japanese brand Honda, German brand Mercedes -Benz and US brand Dodge will have almost the same market share.
The worst hit brands will be the US brand Ford,registering a decline of 0.7 per cent that will be from 7.1 per cent now to 6.4 per cent then.
The next worst hit brand will be the French brand Peugeot.


Research : Tata Young a Thai American singer,model and actress has got her name sought after the Indian car manufacturing brand Tata.When Tata Young's father was travelling in India,and he can't think of a name, those days Tata was very famous in India, and that is how she got her name.

Bata shoe mogul dead

Thomas Bata, owner of the global shoe conglomerate 'Bata', a house hold name in India, died here at the age of 93.
A spokesperson of Bata Shoe Museum said he died early yesterday in Sunnybrook Hospital only weeks before his 94th birthday.
She did not give cause of his death. Funeral arrangements were not immediately known.
Bata is survived by wife Sonja, a son and three daughters.
Bata came to Canada to make his mark, he had said some years ago. "I wanted to do something where I could say OK, now this enterprise I built on my own. Canada was the one country that I selected for this experiment." By 1940, the Batawa plant was in business. And after 1945, when the Czech factories were nationalised by the Communists, the company headquarters was relocated to Toronto under Bata's leadership. Toronto is home to the Bata Shoe Museum, a four-storey structure with 10,000 shoes.
The company returned to the Czech Republic in 1989, after the Communist regime ended, nearly 100 years after the firm was founded in 1894.
Thomas G Bata, a grandson of the founder, became chairman of the business in 2001.
Bata's father, Tomas, a ninth generation cobbler, founded the shoe empire in Zlin in 1894, which later swelled into the giant Bata Shoe Organisation. Thomas Bata ran the shoe company from the 1940s into the 1980s.
"One of the greatest personalities of our time has left," Czech President Vaclav Klaus said in a statement.
"Despite ill fortune in his homeland, he managed to succeed in the world and became for us a symbol of business success. We will all miss him," Klaus said.
Born September 17, 1914, in Czechoslovakia, Thomas Bata's life was buffeted by the worst horrors of the 20th century. He exiled himself in Canada in 1938 when the rise of Nazism forced him to flee his homeland. Seven years later, having served with the Canadian army on the battlefields, he returned to his freshly liberated birthplace, but not for long When the communists took over the country after the WW-II, they seized his factory and declared Bata a capitalist evil.
"I found it very sad," Bata said in an interview in 2005, "because what we thought was liberation really became a dictatorship of the communists." The regime gave the company a new name and it went on making shoes, but it was Bata, headquartered in Toronto that remained a byword for shoes.
Bata broadcast support to the dissident movement on Radio Free Europe and offered his business as a vision of what could be - "so that people would see that the democratic system, based on democratic economy, would be the most advantageous for them." It took 40 years, but vindication finally came in 1989. As Eastern European communist dictatorships collapsed one by one, Vaclav Havel, the Czech dissident leader and playwright turned president, asked Bata to come back.