Business-The Times of India
In an interview to the TOI, the current poster boy of the global car industry, Renault’s CEO Carlos Ghosn and M&M’s charismatic managing director Anand Mahindra exuded an optimism that may well set the future for joint ventures in India’s fast growing automobile business.
And the no-nonsense, tough speaking Ghosn who has worked in the world’s three largest car markets__US, Europe and Japan was clearly in awe of Indian engineering. Why? Because they managed to shave 15% off the Logan’s production costs.
This is the kind of number that has Ghosn drooling. When the car was first thought up at Renault’s headquarters, it was meant to be a no-frills car that had to be built with as little resources as possible. Ghosn thought his company had done a pretty good job with it.
“But there is a thirst for learning here [in India] and that makes the Indian engineer innovate and create a product frugally. Engineers in other parts of the world always need more resources to do the same thing,” he said.
So is there a lesson in what he has seen for global automobile companies? “Yes,” says Ghosn. “They will have to show the humility to come into this country and learn. It isn’t possible to demonstrate such innovation when you work out of markets where resources are not at a premium,” he adds.
Suprised at lessons he’s learnt in India, Ghosn’s infatuation with frugality occupied most of the conversation. “Sure, capital costs are huge issue in this business. But we are discovering through our partnership with M&M that the level of investment for a specific objective can be done frugally.”
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A classic of behavioral psychology. Goes some way towards explaining why individuals fall in line with political or social movements, though flawed. A T-shirt I saw recently in Chicago said “Think…It’s not illegal, yet”
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Bloomberg.com: India & Pakistan
India, the world’s biggest buyer of vegetable oils after China, may import more cooking oil in the year starting November as dry weather reduced monsoon sowing of peanuts, sunflower and sesame seeds.
Purchases may increase by at least 500,000 metric tons from 5.1 million tons this crop year ending Oct. 31, said Govindlal G. Patel, director of Dipak Enterprises, in an interview. Patel, 69, has been trading the commodity for more than four decades.
India imports more than 85 percent of its edible oil in the form of palm oil for use in curries and fried foods. Prices of palm oil have tumbled 44 percent from a March record of 4,486 ringgit ($1,303) a ton, cutting import costs for the South Asian nation that’s battling the fastest inflation in 16 years.
Farmers planted peanuts on 5.03 million hectares, 2.3 percent less from a year ago as of Aug. 28, the farm ministry said. The area for sunflower seeds fell by 30 percent to 495,000 hectares, and for sesame by 9 percent to 1.36 million hectares. The seeds yield more oil when crushed than soybeans.
“Even if there’s an increase in oilseed production, the oil availability will be less as most of the increase in area is in seeds that bear less oil,” Patel said by telephone from Rajkot in Gujarat state. Most of the imports, which have also increased because of lower mustard seed output, will arrive between November and February, he said.
Edible oil imports jumped 10 percent to 3.63 million tons in the nine months ended July from 3.3 million tons in the year ago period, according to the Solvent Extractors’ Association of India. Palm oil made up 88 percent of total purchases.
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