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Business Standard
3 days ago
- Business
- Business Standard
MakeMyTrip adds 'seat availability forecast' feature to ease train bookings
Travel booking major MakeMyTrip on Monday launched Seat Availability Forecast, providing a predictive view of when seats on a selected train are likely to sell out. The Gurugram-headquartered firm said its data shows that nearly 40 per cent of users book train tickets across multiple sessions, often over several days. Among these users, close to 70 per cent end up booking waitlisted tickets, simply because confirmed seats are no longer available by the time their plans firm up. Reserved train tickets in India open for booking 60 days ahead of departure. However, most travellers only finalise their plans much closer to the date, MakeMyTrip stated. "With demand patterns varying significantly from week to week, the window for confirmed bookings keeps shifting. In April, most high-speed trains were sold out around 13 days before the departure date. By May, due to rising demand, they were typically booked out more than 20 days before departure," the NASDAQ-listed company said. For travellers, this means that even when they know which train they want, they often don't have a reliable sense of how long seats will remain available, making timely planning harder, it stated. The new feature is now live on both the MakeMyTrip app and website, embedded within the train booking flow. "We are focused on our mission to anticipate and address the nuanced needs of Indian rail passengers. Seat Availability Forecast is a result of that effort, rooted in data science, built to be seamless, and designed to solve a real planning challenge for millions of users. It is a strong addition to our rail stack, which helps make train travel more predictable and less stressful across the board," Rajesh Magow, Co-founder and Group CEO of MakeMyTrip, said.
News18
12-05-2025
- Business
- News18
SRF Q4 Results: Net Profit Jumps 24.59% To Rs 526 Crore, Income Rises 20.2%
Agency: PTI Last Updated: SRF Ltd's total income increases 20.23 per cent to Rs 4,215.17 crore during the January-March quarter of the 2024-25 fiscal as compared to Rs 3,505.92 crore year ago. SRF Ltd, a chemical sector-focused multi-business entity, on Monday posted a 24.59 per cent jump in consolidated net profit at Rs 526.06 crore in the fourth quarter of the 2024-25 fiscal on strong sales. Net profit stood at Rs 422.21 crore in a year-ago quarter, according to a regulatory filing. Total income rose 20.23 per cent to Rs 4,215.17 crore in January-March quarter of the 2024-25 fiscal as compared to Rs 3,505.92 crore in a year-ago. For the full 2024-25 fiscal, the company however reported a 6.35 per cent drop in consolidated net profit to Rs 1,240.78 crore from Rs 1,335.71 crore in the preceding year. SRF Ltd Chairman and Managing Director Ashish Bharat Ram said: 'We have finished the year on a very strong note, supported by seasonal factors." 'That aside, we will go into the new financial year carrying this momentum. 'However, we are dealing with a very volatile global economy at the moment and while we remain cautiously optimistic about the year ahead, the risks remain," he noted. As of March 31, 2025, the company has applied for 481 patents, with twelve patents applied during the quarter. To date, the company has been granted 151 patents globally. With an annual turnover of Rs 14,358 crore, the Gurugram-headquartered company's diversified business portfolio covers fluorochemicals, specialty chemicals, performance films and foil, technical textiles, and coated and laminated fabrics. First Published: May 12, 2025, 17:22 IST
Mint
10-05-2025
- Business
- Mint
Why Meghana Narayan of Slurrp Farm is going towards the grain
During the pandemic five years ago, Meghana Narayan, co-founder of Wholsum Foods, got a call from an emergency room nurse thanking her. The single mother said she could work through the worst of the pandemic knowing that her daughter was being taken care of at home thanks to Slurrp Farm's snack packs. Wholsum Foods, founded in 2016, retails instant health food brand Slurrp Farm for children and Mille for adults. The call overwhelmed Narayan and validated her idea of starting Slurrp Farm. 'That's what we set out to do, solve for as many people as we could," she says. Narayan and her partner Shauravi Malik's Wholsum Foods champions millet-based and grain-focused ready-to-eat food, using ingredients such as ragi, jowar, foxtail millet, lentils, oats, amaranth nuts and sweeteners like jaggery and honey, with added fruits and vegetables. Their products include cereals, noodles, pasta and instant pancake and dosa mixes sold through online marketplaces. The Gurugram-headquartered company, which employs close to 200 people with sales teams in six cities and production across five factories, claims to have crossed ₹100 crore in revenue in FY24-25, and expects to take it to ₹168 crore in FY25. Some of their competitors are Early Foods, available since 2015, and Snack-A-Doodle, founded in 2021. Slurrp Farm came to fruition when the two mothers to young children saw a gap in the market—healthy snacks for children that could be organised in a jiffy. Narayan, one of India's leading swimmers in the 1990s, had always led a healthy life and felt that there should be more options for working parents. 'There was a way to deliver better nutrition with traditional methods as opposed to adding vitamins and minerals, right? So how do we get ragi to do the magic, make it interesting and yummy, getting that taste-price-nutrition value right. We felt there is a large company to be built here," says the 47-year-old Narayan. 'The vision was to be India's most loved children's food brand." At the Indian restaurant Masala Bay in Taj Land's End, where we are meeting, Gurugram-based Narayan shows no signs of fatigue, having travelled to Mumbai that morning for a conference. She speaks with infectious, excitable enthusiasm as someone who is able to function in fourth gear all the time. April's heat in Mumbai kills appetites, so we settle for a soup each. It's early on a weekday at Masala Bay, which has just started service, and we are the only ones in the restaurant for the longest time. Born in Pune, where her father worked for a telecom company, Narayan moved to Bengaluru around age nine when her father switched jobs. She sees herself as a 'Bangalorean", because she grew up there, found her love for swimming, and because that city 30 years ago made you feel like you wanted to belong. Also read: Why Diageo's Hina Nagarajan is leaving on a high Bengaluru in the 1990s was a swimming powerhouse, producing an assembly line of champions, especially women. Narayan was one of them, besides close friends Nisha Millet, Sajani Shetty and Ashima Shetty. She chose her school (Sacred Heart Girls High School) and college (University of Visvesvaraya College of Engineering) additionally for their proximity to the K.C. Reddy Swim Centre (or KCR). Powered by coach Nihar Ameen at KCR, she balanced academic expectations from her parents with a swimming career that took her to the Asian Games in 1998, made her part of the Indian team for the better part of the 1990s and won a clutch of medals in her favoured butterfly stroke over longer distances. Narayan believes—in hindsight—that swimming shaped everything she has done in her life, the way she is and the way she approaches every problem, pointing to her focused 'persistence on doing everything a little bit better every day and just not giving up". 'My daughter would say, 'mama, you won 400 gold medals. I say, yes, but that means I lost so many more in more than a decade." In her last year of computer science engineering, while Ameen goaded her towards the Olympics (Millet went to Sydney in 2000), she felt it was time to move on. She credits coaches like Ameen and Pradeep Kumar for honing that swimming culture in the city and providing athletes with an enduring legacy. 'All of us have had awesome lives because of it. Also, the mothers (like her own, Raji) were the A-stars there because they did all the work. When you become a mum yourself, you're a little bit like, oh, that's (children) a lot of work," says Narayan, whose 12-year-old daughter is a budding horse rider. On an uncle's suggestion, Narayan applied for—and got—a Rhodes scholarship, picked math and computation at Oriel College in Oxford starting 2000, swam against Cambridge and met her future husband Arunabha Ghosh, now the founder-CEO of the think tank Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW). Bengaluru was at the time home to Infosys, a burgeoning software industry and turning itself from a pretty, leafy town into a megapolis. It felt like Narayan would fit right into this ecosystem. 'But sometimes, when you open many doors, you're confused. I ended up thinking, I no longer want to be a coder at, say, Microsoft." She spent a decade consulting with McKinsey & Co., in Delhi, Mumbai, the US and the UK with two years in between at Harvard Business School (HBS) for an MBA. A colleague at McKinsey, Utsav Baijal, introduced her to her co-founder Malik, assuming that they would get along 'at least because both were south Indian", Narayan remembers with a laugh. The introduction was predestined as the two got along like a house on fire and discovered a common love for food and music in London. They ended up working together, later, while Baijal, now a partner at Apollo Global Management, became an early investor in Wholsum. 'I clearly married the same person twice," says Narayan, laughing, about Malik. 'She irritates me like how my husband does. But I could not have danced without her. Someone said this about us, 'even if this thing is failing, you will not give up. You will not know when to quit'. That might be something that we both share." 'She's the smarter one, the longer-term thinker. Whenever the problem is a bit more complex, requires deeper thought, I'll chuck it her way," says Narayan, who manages operations, sales, product and fund-raises while Malik handles day-to-day finance, marketing and people. Narayan's daughter's birth in 2012 contributed to the idea of Slurrp Farm. The venture was driven by personal need, because Narayan went back to work when her daughter was a few months old, and she could not find any healthy eating options for the child. In a traditional Indian fashion, she called her mother—and grandmother—who got busy sprouting, roasting, grinding ragi and sending it over. Malik, then an investment banker based in the UK, was going through her own crisis at the time, calling her own grandmother. The duo spent most of 2012-15 reading on the subject and meeting people who ran food businesses, like the makers of Bhuira jams and the late K.C. Raghu of Pristine Organics, who encouraged them to just dive in. 'We had read and studied, been to 160-something factories to try and figure out if we want to make these. We were not making complicated products. Just sprouting, roasting, grinding, re-roasting or baking a cookie, a clean one without any random things that make a cookie shiny," Narayan says. It took from 2015, when she quit her job, to about 2018 to get Slurrp off the ground—a difficult few years. Amazon was the first e-commerce platform that sold their products when they launched with cookies and cereals. Wholsum Foods began with money from friends and family before Ashish Dhawan, founder of Central Square Foundation, Sanjeev Bikhchandani, founder of Info Edge, who were also customers, joined other angel investors to raise almost ₹6 crore in 2018. Fireside Ventures came in December 2020 with $2 million as the first institutional capital before another $7 million led by Investment Corporation of Dubai. 'The dreams of our 30s were fuelled by the money we made in our 20s," Narayan says. Actor and producer Anushka Sharma, also a mother by then, came on board in March 2022 as an investor and brand ambassador, which helped bring the company into limelight. 'There is a pet food aisle (in a supermarket), but no kids' food aisle. We're in that business of creating what is right for children until the age of 10. They eat differently, they eat more meals, need more variety," says Narayan. 'Our expansion is not because of any other reason, it's not like the colour of lipstick that there has to be a different one. You have to give the mother that portfolio of things to be able to feed her child and that's what we were trying to solve." She now has ambitions of taking the brand to the US, inspired in part by the example of quinoa. 'There are a lot of American brands (selling quinoa). I was like, that is rubbish, it's a South American product, there's got to be some South American brand that owns the narrative. I feel like with millets, we can't let that go so easily." Their other goal is to reach 100 million people across India—up from the roughly two million they do now. 'The other day somebody said, what are you most proud of? I said our innovation. I can say this with no uncertain terms, feeling no shyness or anything, we are India's most innovative grain company," Narayan adds. She gets a lot of calls from people with lifestyle diseases, seeking help. 'I feel food really can be medicine, right? You can't solve everything with food…till you can. There's a lot to be done in the space, but we are not looking at anything other than going deeper." Also read: Vaibhav Kala of Aquaterra Adventures: The outdoors man
Time of India
05-05-2025
- Business
- Time of India
IT solutions firm Echelon Edge opens new office in Australia
NEW DELHI: Homegrown IT solutions provider Echelon Edge on Monday said it has opened a new office in Adelaide, South Australia, to expand its operations in the wider Asia Pacific (APAC) region. The Adelaide office will serve as a central hub for Echelon Edge's APAC operations, enabling closer collaboration with local enterprises and government stakeholders, the Gurugram-headquartered company said. 'Australia's forward-looking tech environment offers the perfect platform for us to introduce our proven solutions, and with our 'Make in Australia' initiative, we are excited to work in harmony with local businesses to foster growth and innovation,' said Rohit Kataria , chief strategy & sales officer, Echelon Edge. 'To support this, we are planning to establish a local R&D unit and forge strong partnerships,' Kataria added. The company will offer its solutions in network resiliency , cybersecurity, unified data platforms, private 5G , and advanced IT operations, to meet the needs of the Australian market, as per the statement.
Mint
30-04-2025
- Automotive
- Mint
Adani TotalEnergies, Jio-bp, JBM eye Fortum's EV charging biz
New Delhi: Finnish state-run energy power utility Fortum Oyj's efforts to offload a majority stake in its electric vehicle (EV) charging network business in India has zeroed in on three potential suitors–Adani TotalEnergies E-mobility Ltd (ATEL), Reliance BP Mobility Ltd (Jio-bp) and Gurugram-headquartered electric bus manufacturer JBM Group–according to two people aware of the development. 'Adani TotalEnergies, Jio-bp and JBM Group have signed NDAs (non-disclosure agreements) and are evaluating the deal, post which bids will be submitted," one of the two people cited above said, requesting anonymity. London-based Opus Corporate Finance Llp is running the transaction (termed Butterfly) for the EV charging business GLIDA, formerly known as Fortum Charge & Drive India. The development comes in the backdrop of Fortum's renewable energy platform Fortum India Pvt Ltd (FIPL), including carbon credits, being acquired by New York-based I Squared Capital-backed Hexa Climate Solutions, as reported by Mint earlier. A formal announcement to this effect was made on Wednesday. The latest deal, once it fructifies, would signal the exit of Fortum Oyj from India, a market it entered in 2012. 'GLIDA is the last transaction left for Fortum in India after the FIPL sale to Hexa," the person cited above said. GLIDA has around 180 EV charging stations with 850 charging points across the country. ATEL, on its part, has 3,401 installed EV public charging points. A Fortum Corporation spokesperson in an emailed response said, 'As a stock listed company, we do not comment on any market rumours or speculations." Queries emailed to the spokespersons of ATEL, Reliance BP Mobility Ltd, JBM Group, and Opus Corporate Finance on Tuesday afternoon remained unanswered till press time. ATEL is a subsidiary of Adani Total Gas Ltd, which is a joint venture (JV) between Adani Group and France's TotalEnergies. Reliance BP Mobility Ltd is a JV between Reliance Industries Ltd and bp, and has installed around 500 EV charging stations with 5,000 charging points. JBM Group's flagship firm JBM Auto Ltd. is one of India's largest electric bus manufacturers, with the group operating over 1,000 fast chargers. Fortum Oyj had earlier announced that it would limit its exposure in India and was evaluating alternatives for its remaining operations in the backdrop of the war in Ukraine. This resulted in gas supply disruption and substantive losses to Fortum's majority-owned Uniper, which was subsequently sold to the German government at a loss of around €6 billion. Also, the Russian Federation confiscated Fortum's Russian plants valued at around €5 billion. In transactions that were announced starting 8 June 2018 to 3 May 2024, Fortum India has sold 700 MW of solar power plants to Actis Llp; another 230 MW to UK Climate Investments and Elite Alfred Berg; and 185 MW to Malaysia's state-run oil and gas company Petroliam Nasional Bhd or Petronas's unit Gentari. The current transaction comes in the backdrop of Hyderabad-headquartered AM Green acquiring Oulu-headquartered biotechnology firm Chempolis Oy, in which Fortum has a stake, and also Fortum and Chempolis's 50% stake in their joint venture–Assam Bio Refinery Private Limited, as reported by Mint earlier. AM Green was set up by the founders of Greenko Group–Mahesh Kolli and Anil Kumar Chalamalasetty. India currently has around 25,202 EV public charging stations (EVPCS), with close to a fifth or ₹ 2,000 crore of a ₹ 10,900 crore central government scheme allocated for setting them up. Under the PM E-drive (PM Electric Drive Revolution in Innovative Vehicle Enhancement) scheme, the government plans to set up 22,100 public charging stations for electric cars; 48,400 stations for electric bikes, scooters, and three-wheelers; and 1,800 stations for electric trucks and buses by 31 March 2026. India has announced a number of schemes for promoting green mobility–including the ₹ 3,435.33-crore PM e-Bus Sewa-Payment Security Mechanism (PSM) scheme for deploying 38,000 electric buses; and a ₹ 18,100-crore PLI scheme for advanced chemistry cell (ACC) manufacturing, among others. India's Economic Survey presented earlier this year said that electric mobility is an important element in the country's path to net zero. 'Mitigating road transport emissions, which comprise nearly 75 per cent of the emissions from the transportation sector, is critical to India achieving its Net Zero goals by 2070," it noted. 'China's vertical integration across the entire electric vehicle (EV) supply chain, from mining to EV manufacturing, has enabled it to retain its global dominance in this sector," the survey added. Experts said all stakeholders should play their role. 'Highways should be constructed with EV charging stations every 25 km and the capex for that must be accommodated in the highway cost, which hardly makes any difference in the per-km cost of highways," said Reji Kumar Pillai, president of India Smart Grid Forum, an energy transition think tank. 'EV manufacturers' consortiums could also promote setting up of chargers nationwide. In Japan, a portion of the cost of EV is allocated to the fund for setting up chargers," Pillai added.
