Japanese auto major Honda on Wednesday said that India has become its biggest global production hub for two-wheelers with the commissioning of a fourth assembly line at the Narsapura plant of Indian arm with an overall annual production capacity of 64 lakh units.

With the commissioning of the fourth line that has an additional 6 lakh units annually, the Narsapura plant near here of Honda Motorcycle & Scooter India (HMSI) has also become Honda’s single biggest manufacturing plant with an overall capacity of 24 lakh units annually.

Reliance Jio when it launched its services last year, triggered a battle in the telecom sector where all the warring parties such as Airtel, Vodafone, Idea and others had to resort to really aggressive tactics to save their market share. A new report suggests that the suffering is not over in the telecom sector yet. Ratings agency Standard and Poor’s in a note has said that the telecom sector in India will witness around 10 percent fall in revenue in the current year. The report has added that the network providers in the top three positions will control around 85 percent of the revenue market share.

Indian stock markets continued the record breaking rally on Thursday and opened at new highs as the market participants await the RBI’s decision on the benchmark repo rates later today. The Reserve Bank of India is all set to conclude its third bi-monthly monetary policy meeting today and investors widely anticipated a rate cut after the June inflation fell to record low of five years. NSE Nifty opened 22 points higher at 10,136.3 points and BSE Sensex advanced almost 66 points to open above 32,600 points level.

Despite banks having dropped loan rates, the growth in mortgages has dropped to a four-month low of 11.4% year-on-year (y-o-y) in June. Home buyers, according to bankers, are sitting on the fence in anticipation prices will correct further. On June 9, State Bank of India (SBI) had reduced rates on home loans of more than Rs 75 lakh by 10 basis points (bps) to 8.55% for salaried women and 8.6% for others.

Punjab National Bank, India’s fourth-biggest lender by assets, reported a 12 percent rise in quarterly profit, as provisions for bad loans fell, although the profit increase was smaller than expected. Net profit rose to 3.43 billion rupees ($53.51 million) for its fiscal first quarter ended June 30, from 3.06 billion rupees a year earlier, the New Delhi-based bank said on Wednesday.

KOLKATA: Coal India's e-auction of coal sales was up by around 32 per cent to 32.7 million tonne during the first quarter of FY 2017-18.

"The PSU coal mining behemoth has booked 32.7 million tonne of coal through different e-auction schemes during April-June 2017 against 24.8 million tonne in the same quarter in the previous fiscal, an increase of 7.9 million tonne," a CIL official told PTI.

Airtel Payments Bank on Tuesday announced a partnership with Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ltd (HPCL) which will allow its customers to make cash deposits as well as withdraw money through HPCL fuel stations.

All 14,000 HPCL fuel stations will act as banking points for Airtel Payments Bank, the company said in a statement.

A suicide bomber and a gunman killed at least 29 people and wounded 63 at a packed Shiite mosque in Afghanistan's main western city of Herat on Tuesday night, the latest attack to highlight the country's deteriorating security situation.

The assault on the Jawadya mosque in Herat, which is close to Afghanistan's border with Iran, came a day after the Islamic State group claimed a deadly attack on the Iraqi embassy in Kabul.

Yet another large defaulter, ABG Shipyard Ltd., on Tuesday saw insolvency proceedings under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC) 2016 being initiated by the Ahmedabad bench of National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT).

The bench, chaired by Justice Bikki Raveendra Babu, admitted the petition for insolvency proceedings initiated by lender ICICI Bank against ABG Shipyard Ltd for its debt default of over Rs 4,500 crore. Justice Babu appointed Sundaresh Bhat of BDO India, one of the world's largest tax and accounting firm as the interim resolution professional (IRP). A copy of the pronouncement would be put up by the NCLT later.

The Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) has constituted a committee on ‘fair market conduct’, which will be headed by former Lok Sabha secretary and law secretary T K Viswanathan. The panel will have representations from Sebi, mutual funds, brokers, audit firms, stock exchanges, data analytics firms and legal firms.

The committee has been tasked with suggesting improvements to the existing Sebi norms, including on insider trading and fraudulent and unfair trade practices (FUTP). It has been specifically asked to look at trading plans, handling of price-sensitive information during takeovers and aligning of insider-trading rules with provisions of the Companies Act.

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