MUMBAI: Country's third-largest private sector lender Axis Bank today cut its base rate or the minimum rate of lending by 0.20 per cent to 9.95 per cent, following its larger peers who also cut their offerings yesterday after Reserve Bank governor Raghuram Rajan's hard talk.

"Axis Bank has revised its base rate from 10.15 per cent per annum to 9.95 per cent per annum," a bank statement said, adding that the cut is effective from April 13.

Marginal recovery in rate sensitive shares in late trades helped markets recoup intra-day losses to finally end flat even as the Reserve Bank of India at its policy meet early today maintained status quo on key rates.

The 30-share Sensex ended up 12 points at 28,517 while the 50-share Nifty ended nearly unchanged at 8,660.

To safeguard capital markets from cyber attacks, regulator Sebi plans to put in place detailed guidelines to be followed by stock exchanges and other market infrastructure institutions to secure their IT systems.

"The move is aimed at securing the data, applications, database, operating systems and network layers of Financial Market Infrastructures (FMIs) from various forms of cyber attacks such as Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, phishing, hacking, man-in-the-middle attack, sniffing, spoofing, key-logging and malware attacks," a senior official said.

Benchmark indices are trading lower in the noon trades owing to selling pressure in rate sensitive stocks after the Reserve Bank of India kept the repo and reverse repo rates unchanged at 7.5 and 8.5 per cent each respectively at its policy meet today.

Real estate stocks are the worst hit as a cut in interest rates would have helped banks lower EMIs which would have in turn helped real estate companies in increasing their sales.

Reliance Industries' most significant recent gas discovery MJ-1 in KG-D6 block may hold 1.4 trillion cubic feet of gas resources, roughly half of the reserves in the block's main gas fields.

Located about 2,000 meters below the producing D1-D3 field in the eastern offshore KG-D6 block, MJ-1 may hold contingent resource of between 0.988 Tcf of gas and condensate (low estimate) and 2 Tcf (high estimate), according to the firm's minority partner Niko Resources of Canada.

Maruti Suzuki India sold 62,996 factory-fitted compressed natural gas (CNG) vehicles last year, a growth of 23 per cent over the previous year.

The contribution of CNG vehicles to total sales increased to 5.4 per cent from 4.9 per cent a year ago. Six models of Maruti Suzuki are powered by CNG. Five were offered on CNG last year.

Hinduja Automotive Ltd, promoter of commercial vehicle major Ashok Leyland, has reduced its encumbered shares from 16.66 per cent of its total shareholding of 50.38 per cent, to 4.93 per cent, releasing over 330 million shares from HSBC.

According to a filing with the exchanges, the promoter firm has released 26,40,00,000 equity shares from HSBC on February 19, 2015, which accounts to 9.28 per cent of the total share capital. The encumbered shares before the release was 16.66 per cent of the total share capital. The post-event encumbered shares were 7.38 per cent of the total share capital.

CHENNAI: After a neck-and-neck race that lasted two years, Mercedes-Benz is back at the top of the heap in the Indian luxury car market. In the January-March 2015 period, Mercedes-Benz has 3,566 units compared to Audi's 3,181 units in the same period, which makes Mercedes-Benz the leader in the luxury car market ousting Audi from the top spot for the quarter. German rival BMW does not disclose sales numbers but estimates put the brand's January-March 2015 sales at nearly 1,500 units, making it.

The benchmark BSE Sensex pared its early gains to fell by 160 points as interest rate-sensitive stocks slipped after the Reserve Bank Governor Raghuram Rajan kept key repo rates unchanged in its first bi-monthly monetary policy.

The 30-share index, which gained 105.71 points in early trade, fell by 163.50 points, or 0.57 per cent, to 28340.96. The barometer had gained 546.97 points in the previous two straight sessions.

Oracle claimed that it was seeing strong demand for its cloud solutions in India. While the company’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business has seen the highest and fastest adoption, Platform-as-a-Service (Paas) is also close behind.

Addressing a media conference, Shailender Kumar, Managing Director, Oracle India, said “one of the top priorities for the company is to ‘ride the cloud momentum. More than half the business is from the customer experience space with a third of our business coming from the human capital management (HCM) portfolio.”

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