The Venture Intelligence Blog

Businessworld has an article on how the diamond jewelry sector and its "mysterious" practices. Sightholders are a mysterious order of diamond merchants. De Beers’ Diamond Trading Company (DTC) largely sells its rough diamonds only to the sightholders who, in turn, process and release them to the market. They are a crucial and powerful link in the chain of brokers, cutters and wholesalers who drive the $56-billion global retail jewellery trade. There are 93 DTC sightholders worldwide. Thirty seven of these are Indian. They account for 60 per cent of DTC’s global sales. (DTC controls 50 per cent of the global diamond trade.) They are an exclusive and influential lobby. And they are in the middle of a major metamorphosis. (Shreyas Doshi), for several reasons, is one example of the paradigm shift in the business of diamond trading in India. Unlike the archetype, his business is not based out of Opera House, the diamond district of Mumbai. His firm, Shrenuj & Co., is professi...

The Economist has a profile of Helion Ventures. Arun Natarajan is the Founder of Venture Intelligence, the leading provider of information and networking services to the private equity and venture capital ecosystem in India. View free samples of Venture Intelligence newsletters and reports.

Businessworld has a profile of online tutoring firm, TutorVista, which has quickly attracted $12 million in two rounds of venture funding. Tutor Vista now has around 2,200 students, most of whom are in the US. It has around 90 students in the UK, and a few scattered in countries including Finland, Turkey, Japan, South Korea, Australia and Canada. Tutor Vista has over 200 tutors as well, largely living in India. Almost all the teachers work from home. Tutor Vista’s office in Electronic City now has 60 people; this team will expand to 100 by the end of the month. It is the equivalent of air traffic control. They work round the clock and monitor the teaching sessions, help in scheduling a session with a teacher, organise standby teachers in case one drops out at the last minute, and also make sure the information technology infrastructure is ready and running all the time. Ganesh has kept the costs of tuition ridiculously low $100 a month to learn as many subjects as the student wants (O...

Businessworld had an interview with Charles R. Kaye, co-president of Warburg Pincus, who is credited with hiring the highly successful India team. We have got 15 people on the ground here and a portfolio well in excess of $1 billion. India represents the largest single exposure we have outside the US. It is probably 10 per cent of the firm’s investments. However, despite some success today, it is still pretty early. The money required to build the infrastructure — residential and commercial — is huge and the number of manufacturing industries that are going to migrate here, especially those with engineering intensity, is also significant. Broadly, the opportunities for investment are huge. It dwarfs anything the private equity industry could ever think about. ...The opportunity in real estate was greater than what we could cover within the scope of our existing private equity fund, especially in the Asian region. So, we have created a separate real estate entity. It will house all our...

Businessworld has a profile of iLabs-backed TV9, the regional language news channel with an unusual positioning. For those who are wondering what TV9 is and why we are writing about it, check out the rankings for the top 10 news channels over the last two years (see ‘Where TV9 Stands’). TV 9, set up in 2004, is there along with channels that serve much larger audiences — such as Aaj Tak or NDTV India. This means it has managed to get more people to watch Telugu news than other languages. In the Rs 700-crore (advertising) news broadcasting market, that is a big deal. The Rs 30 crore (approx.) ABCL will now test its mettle in many other national and international markets. It will invest about Rs 60 crore in the new domestic channels and Rs 200 crore in the African one. “Several private investors have expressed their interest. We also intend to go public in the next financial year,” says Prakash. Currently, 80 per cent of ABCL is held by iLabs (a venture fund) and Unified Group. Prakash ...

Businessworld has an article capturing the opportunity (and action so far) in the setting up of duty-free shops at the newly privatized airports. Arun Natarajan is the Founder of Venture Intelligence, the leading provider of information and networking services to the private equity and venture capital ecosystem in India. View free samples of Venture Intelligence newsletters and reports.

Following Business Today , Businessworld has a detailed profile of aggressive textiles firm, Spentex Industries. The process of acquiring the largest capacity has also turned it into a highly leveraged one. This year alone, Spentex has raised Rs 360 crore in term loans and Rs 200 crore in equity. In August, it raised Rs 46.6 crore from the first-ever qualified institutional placement (QIP) in India. Investors were hopeful that the acquisition spree would drive their investment in Spentex to appreciate sharply in the currently bullish market. Indeed, the news of the Tashkent acquisition had driven Spentex scrip up to almost Rs 73 from the early August level of about Rs 50. But by first week of December, the scrip had fallen back to below Rs 60. Such indifferent performance is attributed to the sluggish bottomline of the company. “Spentex is growing rapidly but its distributable profits are still not there because of almost Rs 500 crore worth of debt,” points out Sangeeta Tripathi, anal...