RIL is set to be the first oil and gas private major to develop an oil and gas market in the country. It will be inviting price quotes from oil refining companies. This would also set the first benchmark for market-driven prices in the crude oil sector. RIL has had initial round of talks with refinery companies such as Hindustan Petroleum Corp for its Vizag refinery, Mangalore Refinery & Petrochemicals and Chennai Petroleum Corp, to name a few.
RIL would float the tender in a few days when the company would set an indicative benchmarked price based on the quality of the crude. Initial tests have shown the crude to be sweet and light in nature, which is a premium crude. Refinery companies bidding for the crude oil will have to quote a price that is a discount or a premium to the indicative price. Although a final decision is yet to be taken, RIL which has two refineries, including the one being developed by Reliance Petroleum will not bid for the crude. This is aimed at keeping the price discovery process as fair and transparent as possible.
The company is planning to produce 40,000 barrels of oil from the MA field, which is a part of RIL’s D6 block. The government has approved $2.2-billion field development plan (FDP) of the MA field. The production is likely to commence in the second half of 2008.
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India's largest bank State Bank of India revised upwards interest rates on deposits of two years and more with effect from June 1. The deposits for the duration - two years to less than three years will now earn an interest of 8.75 per cent. Also, interest rate on deposits of three years to less than five years has been increased to 8.85 per cent from 8.5 per cent. Interest rates on deposits of five years and up to 10 years will be 9 per cent as against 8.5 per cent at present.
For senior citizens, the deposit of two years and up to 10 years has been bifurcated into two categories of deposits of three years to less than five years and 5 years to 10 years. The interest rates on the new buckets will be 9.35 per cent and 9.5 per cent as against 9 per cent earlier. Interest rates on senior citizen deposits of one year to less than two years will continue to be 9.25 per cent.
The counter-intuitive move to offer higher deposit rates, and crunch its spreads in times of dormant credit off take and rising inflation was not expected at this moment. However, long term loans are seeing growth as there is demand of loans from infrastructure projects, and to manage these, the bank may have hiked deposit rates.
However, SBI says that their move to raise rates is to realign them with that offered by the peers. Besides, the bank is looking at raising long term loans in the early part of the year in order to reduce any pressure on deposit mobilisation at the end of the year. It may also be recalled that SBI had decided to increase its market share in deposit market by 0.25% every quarter.
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Reliance Communications, is gearing up to launch videoconferencing services across 1,100 cities in 113 countries, including the US, Europe, Japan and Middle East nations. The company has also initiated talks with global telecom operators to set up backbones and provide bandwidth for the operations.
The company planning its global videoconferencing foray through its 100% subsidiary Reliance Globalcom, which already has Internet protocol-enabled optical fibre network across the globe. The company is looking at hosting over 2 million simultaneous videoconferences across 70 countries covering 6 continents. RCom, which is already providing videoconferencing services in over 105 cities in the country, is also expanding its presence. The group had earlier entered into tie-ups with over 1,000 corporates, who are using the facility from Reliance World Stores. The company is also providing managed videoconferencing services to customers in the country.
The fast growing global potential of videoconference services provides interesting opportunities to expand its service portfolio using the fully-IP enabled 65,000 fibre Kms undersea cable network connecting 40 top business centers of the world. The present size of global videoconferencing industry is estimated to be around $11 billion (Rs 44,000 crore). In India, the videoconferencing market is growing at over 50 per cent on a year-on-year basis.
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