Mumbai: The BSE’s benchmark Sensex index closed above the 30,000 mark for the first time on Wednesday, riding a worldwide stock rally fuelled by central-bank asset buying. Experts advised investors against irrational exuberance, saying underlying fundamentals hadn’t changed; few expect the liquidity-driven rally to stop.

The Sensex rose 190.11 points, or 0.63%, higher to close at 30,133.35 points. This follows the 50-share Nifty’s record closing above 9,300 points on Tuesday. On Wednesday, the Nifty climbed 0.49% to close at 9,351.85.

Mumbai: Axis Bank Ltd Wednesday reported a 43% decline in net profit in the March quarter from a year ago as the private sector lender raised provisions for bad loans.

The Rs1,225.10 crore net profit compares with Rs2,154.28 crore posted a year ago, and Rs579.57 crore seen in the December quarter.

Country’s largest carmaker Maruti Suzuki India on Thursday reported 15.8 per cent rise in net profit to Rs. 1,709 crore for the fourth quarter of last fiscal ended March 31.

The company had posted net profit of Rs. 1,476.2 crore in the January-March period of previous fiscal, 2015-16, MSI said in a statement.

Microsoft Corp said this week it had wrongly reported that a sharp increase in U.S. government surveillance requests took place during the first half of 2016, revising its official numbers to show the amount remained flat over previous intervals. Microsoft on April 13 released its biannual transparency report stating the company received between 1,000 and 1,499 U.S. surveillance orders under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) for user content between January and June of 2016.

Larsen& Toubro, HCC and Hyundai Engineering are among the dozen firms that have bid for Mumbai’s much-awaited four-lane coastal road project. The road, to be built across nearly 10 km, will run from Princess Street in Marine Lines to the point in Worli where the Bandra Worli sea link ends. The companies have organised themselves into eight consortia.

SAN FRANCISCO: Building on the success of its first-generation AI platform, Infosys Mana and its Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solution, AssistEdge, Infosys on Thursday launched 'Infosys Nia', the next-generation Artificial Intelligence (AI) Platform for businesses.

Infosys Nia converges the big data/analytics, machine learning, knowledge management and cognitive automation capabilities of Mana; end-to-end RPA capabilities of AssistEdge; advanced, high-performance and scalable machine learning capabilities of Skytree; and optical character recognition (OCR), natural language processing (NLP) capabilities and infrastructure management services.

Veteran actor and politician Vinod Khanna who was hospitalised due to 'severe dehydration', passed away on Thursday.

A Bharatiya Janata Party MP from Gurdaspur district of Punjab, Khanna, was hospitalised in HN Reliance Foundation and Research Centre in Girgaum, on March 31 this year.

A Hong Kong-bound Air India flight from Mumbai via Delhi with 256 passengers on board was on Wednesday delayed by nearly three hours due to icing on the exterior parts of the aircraft.

The Boeing 787 Dreamliner plane had flown in from sub-zero temperature and was scheduled for departure from the Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport here at 7.45 pm.

Tata Motors, the most impacted company by last month's Supreme Court ban on registration of vehicles meeting BS-III emission standards, said it might be exporting at least half of its 15,000 impacted light, medium and heavy commercial vehicles (CVs).

For the rest, it is hoping the industry will get a window of opportunity from the court.

Capital market regulator the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) on Wednesday announced the much-awaited commodity market reform of permitting exchanges to launch options contracts.

The move would deepen the domestic commodity market and provide farmers and other participants a new hedging tool, in a more cost-effective manner. Sebi also announced a single-licence regime, allowing stockbrokers to deal in commodities and vice versa. It said within a year, it would allow a single licence for exchanges as well.

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