Small Business

The Inside the Mind of the CEO interview series explores a wide range of critical decisions faced by chief executives around the world. For more insight, see PwC’s CEO Survey. In 2015, Felipe Bayón was on a short list of candidates for the top job at Ecopetrol, Colombia’s state-owned oil and gas company, which was losing money after a collapse in oil prices. But the board named as CEO Juan Carlos Echeverry, a former finance minister, and tasked him with returning Colombia’s biggest company to profitability. One of his first moves was to hire Bayón, a veteran of BP who…

Indian hedge funds have done better than their emerging market peers in a month which saw stock markets lose nearly a quarter of their value amid the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic. Worries about Covid-19 caused stock markets to tank across the world and India’s S&P BSE Sensex to dip 23.05 per cent in March. Indian hedge funds significantly outperformed the broader market and also did better than their emerging market peers. While the Eurekahedge Emerging Markets Hedge Fund Index was down 9.59 per cent for the month, the Eurekahedge India Hedge Fund Index was down…

Get exposure, offer stellar customer service, and be nimble. May 5, 2020 4 min readOpinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Marketing a product and a service are very similar in some ways: You have to identify your customers and their needs, and then craft your pitch to speak to their pain points. Apart from that, however, there are quite a few differences that make marketing a service business more complicated and difficult. For one, you can’t mass-produce services like you can with products, and the customer’s input is much more pronounced. An uncooperative customer can degrade service…

Mutual fund investments consist of both debt and equity investments. A redemption of mutual fund investments gives rise to capital gain or loss, which are taxed as capital gains. A loss, however, can be set-off against other taxable gains from other asset classes. We discuss the tax treatment of the gains and losses below. Debt funds Debt mutual funds typically invest in government securities, corporate bonds, treasury bills, commercial paper, among others, which are usually deemed risk-free. Such funds provide you with returns in the form of dividend and capital gains.…

With activity at near standstill, cement volumes have declined sharply. Analysts at Centrum Broking indicate an average volume impact of 90 per cent in April. While some respite for construction activities was given by the government during the last 10 days of April, this has so far not helped the cement companies. Cement sales stood at just 15-20 per cent of their normal average in April, according to Binod Modi of Reliance Securities. Experts say that the cement demand during the first quarter of the financial year is typically led by housing (60-65 per cent), followed…