Finance Forum India

The vast expanse of office spaces in Bangalore have been the biggest grosser of the city’s commercial market. Investments in this sector can turn out to be some of the best investment bets. Read on to know more.   Real Estate has always been one of the best opportunities for investments. For majority, real estate investment always implied residential property market. Does this mean that commercial segment is not really valued in terms of investments? Well, not really. Growth in commercial realty is an indicator of the development of the economy.   Major Indian cities do offer ample options in commercial...

By Saneil Shah 11th January, 2013 Mumbai   The India Investment Conference 2013 was kicked off by John Rogers, President and Chief Executive Officer, CFA Institute. He spoke about the lost in trust in the markets to allocate capital and risk after the global financial crisis in 2008.   The CFA Institute has recently launched Claritas Investment Certificate (learn more), which is a comprehensive global education program designed to give employees in the investment industry a clear understanding of their industry and their responsibilities within it. (DG has started a new discussion thread on Claritas in the Forum)   The conference had an impressive line of speakers and...

The general feeling that shareholders in India prefer to keep mum rather than voice their protests and can normally be silenced with a generous dividend seems to be changing.   Stanza 481 of the Tamil Classic Thirukkural states that “at the right opportunity, the king could succeed easily in his campaigns”. It emphasises the choice of right time and opportunity, especially by an administrator, to attain success. Shareholders appear to be thinking that this is the right time to take on corporate India and ask the management questions that could embarrass them. A few months ago, The Children Investment Fund (TCI) took...

As a shareholder, Templeton Asset Management has raised some good questions about the Vedanta group’s consolidation plans. It is concerned that the amalgamation of Vedanta Aluminium into Sesa Goa as part of the merger plans within Vedanta Resources will create a sizeable debt overhang for Sesa Goa without bringing in any major benefit, as the two companies operate in different sectors. Since the deal was announced in February this year, there is a reasonable ground to question why it took the investor such a length of time to come up with the observations. But as Sesa Goa has called for a...

Will Britain's so-called Shareholder Spring — the spate of investor rebellions against ultra-generous pay packages, which has already resulted in the ousting of a couple of chief executives — lead to tangible long-term change? Concern about out-of-step executive pay has rumbled under the surface for decades. Over the years, irate shareholders raising questions about huge pay settlements have been a fairly common sight at AGMs, though these were often protests by solitary agents, treated with embarrassed silence from other investors. British investors have gained a pretty passive reputation, as the Ownership Commission chaired by economist Mr Will Hutton, recently noted. “The...