Erratum: Dizzy Valuations

Educomp Solutions...A content provider to the education sector is being valued at Rs4000+ . I don't know why or what makes people cuff up so much money to buy a single share of Educomp solutions. The company is NOT new and may have demonstrated its mettle in the education sector but it still does not deserve such High valuations . Clearly a right example for "Too quick to rise , to quick to attain correction . "

Dizzy Valuations

Educomp Solutions...A content provider to the education sector is being valued at Rs4000+ . I dont know why or what makes people cuff up so much money to buy a single share of Educomp solutions. The company is new and has yet to demonstrate its mettle in the education sector. clearly a right example for "Too quick to rise , to quick to fall. "

KS oils ...........Screaming bargain

Peter lynch would call this stock A screaming bargain. A stock having book value of Rs 85 and selling less than it . Add to it its eps is Rs 25 . bloody hell......
This means that if one were to sell of all its assets ...........at Rs 85 ( its book value ) the cost of the entire company would be Rs 18700 million . But the market was pricing it at Rs 77 ( 16940 million Rupees ) .Now that is a sweet price for a hostile take over .


KS oils is in a relatively simple business to understand, Thus conforming to buffets ideal of "Scope of competence " .


As per me the stock that comes nearest to KS oils valuation is Mtnl . which was also priced close to its book value. But the only issue with mtnl is its eps is a bit low.
But still a good price to enter the stock.

Google, 20% time gets much Revenues

Awe-inspiring Coloum

ON THE CONTRARY

The one-person global company

How many people do you need to run a successful global business? One, actually

LAST week I spent some time with a gent who runs a company in Mumbai that sells software to customers around the world. I had invested in them years ago, and for one reason or another we couldn't catch up much in the middle, except to share notes on email.

Things were going well. He was not huge by global standards - about $250,000 in revenues, slated to double this year. Customers in more than 30 countries. Over 500,000 people around the world who'd tried his product. Over 5,000 of them who had paid for it and who use it. A well-known brand in its field.

The business was profitable. He reckons he is world No.3 in his niche. His product was acclaimed worldwide, reviewed by PC Magazine and such. All in all, it was a pretty good record - having survived through the worst downturns in the market, and still making it. And we were talking of how he'd done it.

It wasn't that he was a coding or technical genius. The gent is actually a biology grad, and to my knowledge, can't write code. But he's always known what he wanted - and has figured out some inventive ways to get things done.

The truly amazing thing is this: he runs the company with a full-time staff of two people, including a peon. His only other employee is a 12th class-pass girl who basically handles all the admin, follow-up and back-end work.

This was of such wonder to me that what was meant to be a 30-minute meeting stretched out well past six hours. I dug deep into how he manages stuff. Turns out he never actually aimed for it to be this way. He had a big staff - at one point, as he said, more than a dozen people. And he had tried every traditional way of running a company and marketing his wares.

But simply, the time to break into the market and the typical attitude of Indian governmental buyers ("Will you kick back 20 per cent to us?") put him off. He was forced to this extreme of leanness more by circumstances than by choice. And he was beginning to revel in it.

I asked him how he got stuff done - and to me it was a rediscovery of globalisation. He has a spiffy-looking website; and he said he had tried numerous Indian web designers but didn't get the finesse he needed. So he went online and found a designer in Canada - a girl he paid some $300, for three hours of work - who did the overall look and feel right. He then contacted someone locally to build the site based on her designs. (This is the second time in the last month I'm seeing Indian web-design needs being outsourced to someone in North America. In each case, someone who took the decision picked perceived quality over low price.)

It went further. His entire product development was outsourced - to someone in Pune he paid top dollar or, as it turns out, Rs 1,000 an hour. This, he felt, gave him the same quality of work he used to earlier contract out to programmers in Ukraine and Bulgaria, where the first versions of his products were produced for about the same price. Again, all of this was online - he never could afford to call overseas.

He had a newer version of the product coming out - and was particular that it needed great icons in its user interface. He took me through a long deal he was doing on the boards of freelancer-haven elance.com, with an icon artist who, on the fifth iteration, had gotten the icons to a point where our man was not unhappy. This deal was entirely conducted online too.

Everything was wired. His credit card processor wired the money to him. He paid Google and other places he advertised on using his credit card. (His major issue was that his card company never raised his credit limit though he was doing five times that value of business.) Everything was wired - and lean.

Except perhaps his online connectivity where he has, for insurance, three providers - two as back-up. One indulgence, in my book, but hey, given that all his business depends on it, it's understandable. We'll see more such 'lone shark' businesses, which'll turn all traditional notions of 'needing an A-team' upside down.

Gas struck in vasai

One more development from a cost cutting point of view. Relaince Just brought in An ALDU ( Auto Lpg dispensing Unit ) , there by cutting the fuel cost price of most vehicles . Not only this I hear that Bajaj is about to launch the LPG fuel powered Bajaj Platina in the next few months.

Major Devlopments

Two major developements, Recently.

One , I got an internet connection.
Sometimes, the most trivial , taken for granted things become so elusive . Inspite of Bsnl launching Broadband connections almost a year ago.......... I never could procure a True Broabband connection. An internet connnections throws open a host of possiblities....
Finally , it was our erstwhile Tata, that decided to give me a broadband connection.
and look how have I managed to Get a Broadband connection.
I have copper lines leased from BSNL, Reliance provides me with basic telephone service , and the local exhange has TATA DSLAM which enables the copper wire to carry , ADSL signals
So a combination of the three majors have some how managed to give me broadband connection, so very vital , and that too at dirt cheap pricing,
RS 400 for 256 speed from 8Pm - 8 AM

I am now able to download movies and faster rate, view multiple webpages, at the same time,


2nd development
The much awaited four way rail track between borivilli and Virar is finally finished, ending the decade long wait for comfortable travel for Western railway commuters.

Earlier some weeks back it wat touted that only passenger and frieght trains, but then out slow government , slowly introduced some 20 new trains on the new route.

Gas based bikes a reality soon

As much expected , Bajaj is all Set to roll out lpg fuelled bikes
Pioneers in their field and known to rewrite market Rules, Bajaj has stood up to its Tradition. Not only is Lpg cheaper.......it takes very less to transport , and store LPG. Pressure required to keep lpg liquified is just a few atmospheres. As opposed to CNG. The only disadvanges with LPG is it is highley combustible , if something goes wrong . Cng on the other hand gets easily diffused in the Air, simply because of high Methane content .


Lpg is available all over india, as opposed to CNG which is only availbale in Mumbai , Delhi, Gujarat, Hyderabad

Bajaj also has plans to launch CNG fuelled Vehicles .

Commodity exchanges in india

This indicates something: consumptions lead growth. The US has some 350 million people and still consumes most of what the world produces. The US consumes 10 times more electricity . India with a population of 1100 million people, bleeds due to load shedding. The concept of load shedding is anathema in the US . Nymex : The US equivalent of MCX has a host of commodities being traded including power.

777, Reliance Phones

some time I back i expressed confusion on how low can handset prices stoop, only to see Reliance come up with another market changing offer, by offering handsets at Rs 777. Coupled with the low cost Life time offers, the total cost of owning a handset for a llife time comes to some Rs 1000. Reliance relaunched the 24 hours free talk offer, again heralding a new scheme accelarating commerce.

a post worth reading

This was posted on one of the networks by Anaggh Desai

Sent to me by a friend :

They are the poster boys of matrimonial classifieds. They are paid handsomely, perceived to be intelligent and travel abroad frequently. Single-handedly, they brought purpose to the otherwise sleepy city of Bangalore.

Indian software engineers are today the face of a third-world rebellion. But what exactly do they do? That's a disturbing question. Last week, during the annual fair of the software industry's apex body Nasscom, no one uttered a word about India's programmers.

The event, which brought together software professionals from around the world, used up all its 29 sessions to discuss prospects to improve the performance of software companies. Panels chose to debate extensively on subjects like managing innovation, business growth and multiple geographies.

But there was nothing on programmers, who you would imagine are the driving force behind the success of the Indian software companies. Perhaps you imagined wrong. "It is an explosive truth that local software companies won't accept.

Most software professionals in India are not programmers, they are mere coders," says a senior executive from a global consultancy firm, who has helped Nasscom in researching its industry reports.

In industry parlance, coders are akin to smart assembly line workers as opposed to programmers who are plant engineers. Programmers are the brains, the glorious visionaries who create things. Large software programmes that often run into billions of lines are designed and developed by a handful of programmers.

Coders follow instructions to write, evaluate and test small components of the large program. As a computer science student in IIT Mumbai puts it if programming requires a post graduate level of knowledge of complex algorithms and programming methods, coding requires only high school knowledge of the subject.

Coding is also the grime job. It is repetitive and monotonous. Coders know that. They feel stuck in their jobs. They have fallen into the trap of the software hype and now realize that though their status is glorified in the society, intellectually they are stranded.

Companies do not offer them stock options anymore and their salaries are not growing at the spectacular rates at which they did a few years ago.

A Microsoft analyst says, "Like our manufacturing industry, the Indian software industry is largely a process driven one. That should speak for the fact that we still don't have a domestic software product like Yahoo or Google to use in our daily lives."

IIT graduates have consciously shunned India's best known companies like Infosys and TCS, though they offered very attractive salaries. Last year, from IIT Powai, the top three Indian IT companies got just 10 students out of the 574 who passed out.

The best computer science students prefer to join companies like Google and Trilogy. Krishna Prasad from the College of Engineering, Guindy, Chennai says, "The entrance test to join TCS is a joke compared to the one in Trilogy. That speaks of what the Indian firms are looking for."

A senior TCS executive, who requested anonymity, admitted that the perception of coders is changing even within the company. It is a gloomy outlook. He believes it has a lot to do with business dynamics.

The executive, a programmer for two decades, says that in the late '70s and early '80s, software drew a motley set of professionals from all kinds of fields.

In the mid-'90s, as onsite projects increased dramatically, software companies started picking all the engineers they could as the US authorities granted visas only to graduates who had four years of education after high school.

After Y2K, as American companies discovered India's cheap software professionals, the demand for engineers shot up," the executive says. Most of these engineers were coders. They were almost identical workers who sat long hours to write line after line of codes, or test a fraction of a programme.

They did not complain because their pay and perks were good. Now, the demand for coding has diminished, and there is a churning.

Over the years, due to the improved communication networks and increased reliability of Indian firms, projects that required a worker to be at a client's site, say in America, are dwindling in number. And with it the need for engineers who have four years of education after high school.

Graduates from non-professional courses, companies know, can do the engineer's job equally well. Also, over the years, as Indian companies have already coded for many common applications like banking, insurance and accounting, they have created libraries of code which they reuse.

Top software companies have now started recruiting science graduates who will be trained alongside engineers and deployed in the same projects. The CEO of India's largest software company TCS, S Ramadorai, had earlier explained, "The core programming still requires technical skills.

But, there are other jobs we found that can be done by graduates." NIIT's Arvind Thakur says, "We have always maintained that it is the aptitude and not qualifications that is vital for programming. In fact, there are cases where graduate programmers have done better than the ones from the engineering stream."

Software engineers, are increasingly getting dejected. Sachin Rao, one of the coders stuck in the routine of a job that does not excite him anymore, has been toying with the idea of moving out of Infosys but cannot find a different kind of "break", given his coding experience.

He sums up his plight by vaguely recollecting a story in which thousands of caterpillars keep climbing a wall, the height of which they don't know. They clamber over each other, fall, start again, but keep climbing. They don't know that they can eventually fly.

Rao cannot remember how the story ends but feels the coders of India today are like the caterpillars who plod their way through while there are more spectacular ways of reaching the various destinations of life.

India Stops Importing Phone and starts Exporting

India world largest Telecom Market stops Importing Mobiles and rather starts exporting them। Import always had its "मच मच "- increased cost , addition to import bill, Loss of foreign exchange . The numbers are also interesting .

Here is another company that is into reducing handset prices for India.


Already Handset prices have hit a new low. I purchased a Nokia 1255 for 1700/- which was being sold at 3000 a year ago. handset prices अब और कितना कम होगा साला .

Smelling Gas !........... smooth

Aaah finally I had something to say........ I had been waiting for these developments to happen for quite some time. The comming of Gas in My Near By Vicinity. Since I stayed in Vasai, Most Vehicles plying in Vasai have to go to the nearest CNG filling point i.e Mira Road....which happens to be 20 Kms from Vasai. For long I had been wondering that It would take years for Gas a gas pipeline to be launched in Vasai. But no !. Things have changed since I discovered this.

Yes ,........ if you search on the internet .....there is this Dahej Uran pipeline ........promising enough to gasify entire Mumbai- Ahemadabad highway.

Add to it ..........I found another Gas filled link on the internet

Yes ........... All till I had become tired of asking people in and around hyderabad whether they have spotted a cng filling station in hyderabad.......or whether they had seen any vehicles plying on CNG..........only to be given bewildered eyes (what the f*#k are you asking ? what are your intentions ? )