MUMBAI: Nexus India Capital, India’s leading early stage fund on Wednesday announced the closure of Nexus India Capital II, L.P., a 220 million dollar fund which will invest in early stage companies with significant market opportunity or delivery presence in India. The fund will focus on domestic consumer and business services, technology, media and cleantech, investing up to 10 million dollars per company.

The Fund was raised in turbulent market conditions and was significantly oversubscribed. The Fund’s investors include leading endowments, foundations, sovereign wealth funds and other institutions from North America, Europe and Asia.
Commenting on the occasion, Naren Gupta Managing Director of Nexus India Capital said, “We are delighted to have received such overwhelming support for Nexus, which underscores the attractiveness of the investment opportunity and the expertise of our investment team.

The closure of the Fund during the global market meltdown represents a major endorsement of our track record in spotting winners in early stage investments and Investing behind six-sigma entrepreneurs who are creating market leaders”.

Nexus is founded by CEOs of successful high growth global companies - Naren Gupta, Sandeep Singhal and Suvir Sujan. Apart from the founders, the Nexus team includes experienced professionals who support passionate entrepreneurs in building companies that are market leaders.

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“Switzerland is in favour of India developing its civilian nuclear energy. Switzerland depends on nuclear power for 30 percent of its energy needs. We have had a good experience with nuclear energy so far,” the envoy told IANS in an interview.

“Increasingly, there is a realisation that the world has to depend on nuclear energy if they have to solve the problem of global warming. Europe is also realising it,” Dreyer said.

“A decision on Switzerland’s position in the NSG has not been taken. It will be taken shortly,” he said on a cautious note in view of the strong anti-nuclear lobby in his country.

“This question of NSG is not a big talking point in public debate in Switzerland. There are, however, concerns about nuclear waste and safety aspects of nuclear installations.”

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Hong Kong tycoon Richard Li’s attempt at building a fortune of his own and stepping out of his father’s shadow reads a bit like a soap opera.

Mr Li, the younger son of Li ka-Shing, Asia’s wealthiest man, started by building a media empire with a multi-million dollar investment from his father.

His success in taking a local TV firm regional - beaming programmes as far afield as India - helped expand that empire.

Star TV offered Asia its first taste of satellite broadcasting in a region dominated by government media controls. He sold it to Rupert Murdoch’s New Corp for $950m in 1995.

Two years later came the Asian financial crisis and deal-making hit a new low for the Lis and everyone else in Asia.

The internet and all its attendant possibilities took hold of investors near the turn of the new century and Mr Li rode the crest of the wave.

He sparked a frenzy in all things internet-related after buying a telecommunications equipment distributor and calling it Pacific Century Cyber Works with the intention of making it into Asia’s leading internet firm.

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SAN FRANCISCO -(Dow Jones)- Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) is simplifying its licensing policy for big customers, lifting restrictions against moving applications to different servers in corporate data centers.

The new licensing regime is designed to make it easier for customers to use ” virtualization” technology, which is growing in popularity, and is expected to kick-start sales of Hyper-V, a virtualization technology Microsoft launched in June.

Although they say this is good news for large customers, several analysts said the new approach appears to be designed to push customers to use Hyper-V at the expense of competing virtualization technology, by making it harder to get the same flexibility with a non-Microsoft technology. This could be damaging for Microsoft’s key competitor in this space, Palo Alto, Calif.-based VMware Inc. ( VMW).

Virtualization is technology that allows companies to squeeze more processing power out of existing computers, by making one processor do the work of several. Microsoft recently launched Hyper-V, which is targeted at VMware, the market leader. VMware said at the time of its second-quarter earnings in July that it saw evidence that enterprise licensing agreements were weakening.

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The Bank of Japan began a two-day monetary policy meeting Monday in which it is widely expected to keep its key interest rate unchanged amid growing jitters about the country’s slowing economy.

Facing the prospect of recession, the seven-member central bank policy board will likely maintain the benchmark overnight call rate at 0.5 percent for the 18th straight month.

It may also continue lowering its overall view of the world’s No. 2 economy after saying in July that growth is slowing, “reflecting weaker growth in business fixed investment and private consumption against the backdrop of high energy and materials prices.”

Last week, the government reported that Japan’s economy shrank for the first time in a year in the second quarter, with gross domestic product registering a 2.4 percent annualized decline.

The Cabinet Office’s August report also painted a dark picture of Japan’s economic health.

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(Bloomberg) — China South Locomotive & Rolling Stock Corp. jumped 58 percent on its first day of trading in Shanghai, a sign that demand for new shares is withstanding the worst stock-market slump in more than a decade.

The nation’s biggest maker of trains rose to 3.45 yuan from an offer price of 2.18 yuan, making it the second-best debut performer this year on the exchange. The benchmark CSI 300 Index fell 5.5 percent and is down 61 percent from its October peak.

China South raised $1.48 billion in a combined Shanghai and Hong Kong sale, testing investors’ appetite as stocks dropped on concern slowing economic growth will hurt earnings. China plans to spend 2 trillion yuan ($291 billion) on railway systems through 2020, which may help China South weather any slowdown.

“This company’s main business is based on infrastructure investment, and people think this sector will perform well even if the whole economy is weak,” Zheng Tuo, who manages $790 million at Bank of Communications Schroder Fund Management Co., said in Shanghai.

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Oil prices were slightly higher Monday on concerns that Tropical Storm Fay may disrupt oil operations in the Gulf of Mexico.

By midday in Europe, light, sweet crude for September delivery rose 26 cents to $114.03 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract fell $1.24 on Friday to settle at $113.77 a barrel.

In London, October Brent crude was up 39 cents to $112.94 a barrel on the ICE Futures exchange.

“There could be some supply disruption issues there so the market is watching this closely,” said Mark Pervan, senior commodity strategist at ANZ Bank in Melbourne.

Fay, the sixth storm of the 2008 Atlantic season, was slowing down early Monday and moving erratically, but forecasters still expected it to strengthen slowly to a hurricane. Fay has already killed at least five people after battering Haiti and the Dominican Republic with weekend torrential rains and floods.

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(Bloomberg) — China South Locomotive & Rolling Stock Corp., the nation’s biggest maker of rail and rapid transit vehicles, raised HK$4.16 billion ($533 million) from a Hong Kong initial public offering, said two people familiar with the sale.

The Beijing-based company sold 1.6 billion shares, or a 14 percent stake, at HK$2.60 each, said the people, who asked not to be identified before an official statement. The price, which falls in the middle of the HK$2.49 to HK$2.76 range that the stock was offered at, values the company at 13.8 times 2009 earnings, as estimated by banks involved in the sale.

The pricing signals investors are less willing to pay top dollar for new shares in Hong Kong, where the Hang Seng Index has slipped 24 percent this year on concern over the U.S. housing crisis and a global slowdown. At least eight companies have canceled Hong Kong IPOs this year, according to Bloomberg data.

“Long-term earnings growth should be stable, and stability is the best we can expect in the current market,” said Winson Fong, who oversees $3 billion at SG Asset Management in Hong Kong. “The pricing indicates that the response has been just average — neither on the low end nor the high end.”

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Bloomberg) — Hong Kong’s growth cooled more than economists expected to the slowest pace since the third quarter of 2003, when the economy began to recover after shrinking during the severe acute respiratory syndrome epidemic.

Gross domestic product rose 4.2 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier, after gaining a revised 7.3 percent in the previous three months, the government said today at a press conference. That compared with the 5.9 percent median estimate of 15 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News. None had forecast such a small increase.

A global slowdown and a more expensive yuan have curbed demand for Chinese-made exports shipped through Hong Kong, a trade hub for China. Rising prices and a stock-market decline have curtailed consumer spending and dimmer growth prospects have damped business sentiment.

“This is a broad-based slowdown — the spillover of the global slowdown has directly impacted Hong Kong’s economic growth through trade and indirectly through domestic sentiment and consumption,” said Kelvin Lau, an economist at Standard Chartered Bank Plc in Hong Kong. “This is the start of a down cycle and we will see things slowing down for at least a couple of quarters ahead.”

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Aug. 15 (Bloomberg) — John McCain’s presidential campaign lacks the support of several Republican-leaning industries central to President George W. Bush’s record-setting fundraising four years ago.

Democrat Barack Obama has captured $9.6 million in donations from employees working for securities, mortgage and drug companies, compared with McCain’s $6.6 million. In 2004, people in those industries gave $10.6 million to Bush and $5.4 million to Democratic nominee John Kerry, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a research group in Washington.

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Several developing countries are expected to oppose a proposal by World Trade Organization chief Pascal Lamy to “freeze” the issues on which there is convergence within the Doha Development Agenda and resolve the outstanding issues, Business Standard was told.

Lamy, who is visiting New Delhi, is understood to have campaigned for this with Indian leaders and has sought to know if India is ready to send its senior officials for a meeting next month. But India and other developing countries have rejected the proposal to “lock in” the areas of convergence on the ground that it will amount to “pocketing” the gains while leaving most of their concerns in the bracketed terrain of unresolved issues.

“Effectively, the idea will result in leaving the developing countries high and dry while the industrialised countries will be left off the hook,” said an Asian trade envoy.

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The first quarter of 2008-09 saw Dell post an impressive growth of 99% over the previous year. This comes at a time when the economy is reeling and the slowdown has forced companies to resort to cost-cutting to remain competitive.

Michael Dell who was on a trip to India to launch the latest line of Latitude business notebooks in India said ‘Dell has fared tremendously in the last one year. On the global scale, we grew by about 50% faster than the industry in the last nine months alone.” Dell also reported 70 to 80% growth in the number of units sold in India as well.

Speaking on the occasion, Michael Dell also touched upon the global importance of India for Dell. Dell has 13,000 employees in India - a number second only to the United States. In the commercial business segment, Dell is the market leader here. They would like to replicate the success of the commercial division with the Home and Small business division as well for sure.

Also speaking on the occasion was Mr. Paul-Henri Ferrand, the President of the Asia Pacific region. When asked about the introduction of Dells Alienware line of highly-customizable, high-end systems in India, Ferrand confirmed that India was not on the Alienware radar at least for the time being as the current XPS series fills the high-end void pretty well.

If armed conflict in Georgia proves short-lived, the effect on economic relations between Russia and Europe could be limited. That, in any event, is what European business leaders fervently hope. For companies such as carmakers Daimler (DAI), Renault (RENA.PA), and Fiat (FIA.MI), fast-growing Russia has become an increasingly important market, helping to compensate for slowing sales in Western Europe. “I don’t think the conflict will have big consequences, at least if it doesn’t escalate,” says Martin Hoffmann, a Russia expert for the Federation of German Industries.

But Russia’s willingness to use force to pursue its interests will certainly give companies pause about investing there in the future. And it will give impetus to efforts by European countries to become less dependent on Russian energy. “The main problem for Russia is that investor perception, which was already low, will deteriorate even further,” says Katinka Barysch, deputy director of the Centre for European Reform, a London think tank.

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The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) may extend the period for unwinding participatory notes, or P-notes, on underlying derivatives from 18 months to 24 months, the Business Standard daily said.

P-notes are issued by foreign institutional investors registered in India to unregistered overseas investors. The regulator put curbs on them last year to help the government keep track of foreign flows into the country.

It restricted issuance of P-notes in the spot segment to 40 percent of assets under custody and the Business Standard said it might raise the cap to 45 percent from 40 percent.

A spokesman for SEBI declined comment on the report. SEBI is scheduled to meet later on Wednesday and is expected to review the P-note rules, an official had told Reuters.

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Microsoft Corporation India Pvt Ltd. Today announced that as per Gartner’s Asia Pacific software revenue estimates, it has emerged as the leading vendor of Business Intelligence solutions in the country.    The Gartner “Market share: Business Intelligence Platform Software, Asia Pacific and Japan, 2007” report (1) estimates that with a growth rate of 40.5 per cent, the Business Intelligence software revenues in India were $19.4 million during 2006-07.    

As per the study, Microsoft is also ahead of the competition in the overall APAC Business Intelligence (BI) platform market for a second consecutive year.The study highlights that in APAC, Business Intelligence software revenues grew a healthy rate of 26.1 percent and in value terms the market stood at $339.7 million during 2006-2007.   Microsoft has maintained its last year’s position as the market leader with a current 20.13 per cent market share, growing by 25.5 percent to reach software revenues worth $68.4 million in the Asia pacific BI market.     

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HONG KONG - While heads continue to roll at banks on Wall Street and in the City of London, senior bankers from Europe and North America are seeking refuge in the East, where the financial sector is enjoying more fortuitous times.

“There’s a huge influx of people wanting to come from the West,” said a top headhunter with one of the pre-eminent executive search firms in Asia.

The Western bankers are arriving in such numbers that house prices in the city have been forced up and reservations at the best local restaurants are harder to come by, said an experienced figure in Hong Kong’s private-equity industry.

Many of the new arrivals are from New York and London, where massive losses at some banks have led to slashed head counts. Recent estimates suggest more than 50,000 positions have been cut by the big European and North American banks since the credit crunch began last summer and tens of thousands of additional losses are widely forecast, forcing bankers to ply their trade in exotic locales.

“Europeans have always come here, but recently more and more bankers are arriving from the U. S., too,” the Hong Kong-based headhunter said.

(Bloomberg) — UBS AG, Switzerland’s biggest bank, plans to separate its investment banking and wealth management units after a fourth straight quarterly loss caused by subprime- related writedowns.

UBS rose as much as 3.8 percent in Swiss trading after Chairman Peter Kurer said the Zurich-based bank will give its three business divisions greater autonomy to increase “strategic flexibility.” The decision adds to speculation the company may eventually jettison the securities unit, JPMorgan Chase & Co. analyst Kian Abouhossein said in a note to clients.

Kurer is abandoning his predecessor Marcel Ospel’s push to integrate the divisions after record losses at the securities unit led to net withdrawals from the private bank for the first time in almost eight years. UBS, the European bank hardest hit by the collapse of the U.S. subprime mortgage market, has faced calls from investors including former president Luqman Arnold to split off the investment bank.