HUL wins lawsuit against Amul over ice-cream advertisement
MUMBAI: Hindustan Unilever Ltd (HUL) on Friday won a lawsuit it filed in the Bombay high court against Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation (GCMMF), owner of Amul brand, for airing ads that it said disparaged frozen desserts.
HUL, India’s largest packaged consumer products maker, produces the Kwality Wall’s brand of frozen desserts and icecreams. A single-judge bench comprising justice SJ Kathawalla granted HUL’s plea for an injunction against the advertisements that Amul began airing in March. The court also denied GCMMF’s plea for a stay.
The plea was granted on grounds that the ads disparaged the entire category of frozen desserts in which Kwality Wall’s is the leader.
“This court having come to the conclusion that defendant No. 1 is guilty of disparaging the rival product, i.e. frozen desserts, by making false statements of facts with regard to the same and also indulging in a neg- ative campaign, and asking the consumers not to have frozen desserts but instead have the product of defendant No.1, i.e. Amul ice-cream, which is not permissible in law, the question of granting any stay on the order does not arise. The application for stay is therefore rejected,” justice Kathawalla said.
Justice Kathawalla also refused to suggest changes to the ads, saying that “the disparaging manner in which the impugned TVCs are made/prepared, it is in any event not possible to direct/ order/suggest any modification/s to the same”.
“We are pleased that the Honourable Bombay high court while injuncting Amul’s advertisement has agreed with HUL’s contention that Amul’s advertisement is false, misleading consumers and disparages frozen desserts,” Sudhir Sitapati, executive director-refreshments, HUL, said in an e-mailed statement. “Kwality Wall’s products are made with milk/milk solids and do not contain vanaspati. In fact, our frozen dessert products use milk without cholesterol to offer healthy and exciting choices to consumers,” he added.
GCMMF managing director RS Sodhi did not respond to a request for comment. NEW DELHI: India is ready to launch the Goods and Services Tax (GST) on July 1, Hasmukh Adhia, revenue secretary at the Finance Ministry, told Reuters, saying the technology that will drive it is robust and dismissing fears the tax is too complicated.
Adhia added that rules would be issued “soon” to deter unscrupulous businesses from exploiting the tax reform to gouge customers. “Everything is ready. We will roll out on July 1,” he said in an interview in Delhi.
Where the headline rate of tax goes up under GST, the government will be vigilant in seeking to prevent profiteering.
“We will come out with our anti-profiteering rules soon,” Adhia said, without elaborating. Adhia said the GST would be reviewed on an ongoing basis, adding that he would like to see the top rate reduced in future. He dismissed speculation that the GST Network might crash, or data security may be compromised, after launch. NEW DELHI: For those worrying today about their retirement, your biggest challenge is ensuring that you have enough for maintaining your lifestyle in the far future. A house that will run on ₹50,000 a month today, at just 6% inflation, will need almost ₹1.6 lakh to run in 20 years and about ₹3 lakh to run in 30 years. But inflation is relentless.
At 60, if you need ₹3 lakh a month, at 70 you will need almost ₹5.5 lakh. At 80 you’ll need almost ₹10 lakh a month. If these numbers seem too bizarre, go back to the top of this column.
How do you know how much to save for an event that is so far into the future?
Given that we do not want a plan that looks at eating up capital, but want to use only the interest, rent and dividend from our money, and want to leave the assets for the children, how do we plan for retirement?
Data crunching says that if you are 30 years old and you save about 30% of your post-tax income for the next 30 years, you will have enough. If you are 40 and you save 40% of your posttax income, you are good.
But at 50, if you have not a rupee in savings, then you need to save 80% of your post-tax income—you’ve left it too late. My assumptions are that your income grows at 10% every year, your spends at age 30 grow at 6% a year, you consume 70% of your pre-retirement spend at age 61 and then your spends grow at 6%. You definitely use an equity route to retirement corpus building and you use laddering (using a mix of fixed return and equity post retirement), inflation is at 6%, risk-free return (government bonds or FDs) is at 7% and you live till 99.
I also assume that your EMI and other goals are all on top of this saving. Remember, the spends are only growing at 6%, while saving is growing at 30% or 40%—so there is enough elbow room. This model also gives plenty of elbow room for sudden global shocks by overestimating the final corpus. If you already have savings and assets, then you can save a little less. Do fac-