On Tuesday, the GST Council okayed 28% GST on online gaming, casinos, and horse racing. This tax will be levied on the face value. This will bring all these activities at par with betting and gambling. However, the games of skill will be treated differently. Currently, most of the gaming sits pay GST only at 18%. In case of casinos, this tax will be levied on the face value of chips purchased while in case of horse racing, the GST will be levied on the full value of bets placed with the bookmaker. Online gamers have objected to it.
Just a day after the Vedanta Foxconn joint venture was called off, Foxconn has decided to go ahead and negotiate for 2 fab plants in Indi and plans to tie up with a Taiwanese fab maker. Foxconn plans to make both chips; i.e., silicon chips and gallium nitride chips in India. The latter is used extensively in telecom and EVs. It may be recollected that Foxconn and Vedanta had originally planned to set up a $9.5 billion plant to manufacture chips at Dholera in Gujarat. Foxconn annually buys $40 billion of chips for its EMS.
Defence stocks continued its frenetic rally on Tuesday with stocks like Mazagon, BDL and Cochin Shipyard rallying by up to 10%. This rally came after news that the Ministry of Defence had cleared the procurement of 26 Dassault Rafale aircraft ahead of the prime minister’s visit to France. Mazagon Docks hit a new high after the MOD cleared the procurement of 3 additional Scorpene class submarines. These submarines are slated to be built at the Mazagon site, while the French Naval group will provide necessary designs for it.
A sudden spurt in the prices of vegetables has once again raised the spectre of food inflation surging in next few weeks. Unprecedented rains and floods in the Northern region have caused huge damage and impacted agri supply lines badly. Vegetable prices are likely to come down only after normal movement starts. What began with a surge in tomato prices has spread to all vegetables. Also, vegetables have a high weightage in the food CPI basket, so it is very likely to stoke inflation. This comes on top of late monsoons.
A day ahead of its IPO opening, Utkarsh Small Finance Bank has raised Rs222.75 crore via anchor share placement. The anchor portion is 45% of the issue size and smacks of high levels of institutional interest in the stock. A total of 20 anchor investors participated in the anchor placement, with nearly half of them being SEBI registered mutual funds. SBI MF, ICICI Prudential MF, Aditya Birla MF and Kotak MF were some of the prominent mutual funds that participated in anchor placement. Utkarsh IPO is entirely a fresh issue.
Supreme Court adjourned the hearing on the Adani Hindenburg case. It has asked SEBI to circulate its response to the recommendations made by the expert committee. This pertains to whether the SEBI 2019 rules make it tougher to identify the eventual beneficiaries of offshore funds. The allegation had been that Adani had managed to get away due to the relaxation of end beneficiary norms in the SEBI 2019 regulations, something the SEBI counsel strongly denied. SC committee had ruled out regulatory lapses.
Blackstone, Brookfield, Adani Connex, and others are planning to add about 3,335 MW of data centre capacity in India shortly. This entails outlay of Rs150,000 crore. Data centre capacity in India is slated to double from 870 MW in FY22 to 1,800 MW in FY25. Adani Connex has already laid out plans to build nearly 1,000 MW of data centres in the next 10 years. Meanwhile, Lumina Cloud (backed by Blackstone) is also adding 600 MW of data centre capacity. Data centres are a key trigger for the real estate demand in India.
Tata group could soon become the first Indian iPhone maker as it plays to take over the Wistron facility in India for around $600 million. Wistron is one of the major global outsources for Apple iPhones apart from Foxconn and Pegatron. This is likely to boost the efforts of Apple to diversify its manufacturing base outside of China. In the June quarter, Wistron exported nearly $500 million of iPhones from India. Tatas also have big chip making ambitions and ecommerce plans; part of the next phase of the group’s growth.
