Sanjiv Goenka Group to split flagship firm CESC into four units
The RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group on Thursday announced a four-way split of its flagship firm, CESC Ltd, but shares of the power utility fell 15% after the plan was made public.
The diverse businesses of CESC are being split into separate entities with the aim of “unlocking value for shareholders”, the firm said in a regulatory filing, but investors slammed the stock. CESC plunged 15.1% to ₹829.80 on BSE in a weak market, only two days after hitting a 52-week high of ₹1,001.85.
Some analysts and stockbrokers, however, said CESC’s shares fell because of confusion over its March quarter earnings. The restructuring scheme, they said, was not much different from what was anticipated.
After restructuring, CESC will be split along four lines of business: power generation, power distribution, retailing and business process outsourcing. CESC will only distribute power; power generation will be transferred to Haldia Energy Ltd.
For every 10 shares in CESC, shareholders will get five shares of ₹10 each of the restructured CESC, five shares of ₹10 each of Haldia Energy and six shares of ₹5 each of RP-SG Retail Ltd, which will be the holding company for the retail business. CESC shareholders will also get two shares of ₹10 each in RP-SG Business Process Services Ltd.
Apart from holding CESC’s 55% stake in business process outsourcing firm Firstsource Solutions Ltd, this firm will also own the Rising Pune Supergiant cricket team and the group’s new ventures such as consumer goods, the group said in a filing.
The shareholding pattern of all four firms will be identical, said group chairman Sanjiv Goenka. All four will be publicly listed. Consulting firms Grant Thornton and KPMG had advised the group on the restructuring, Goenka added.
About the flagship power business, he said the group will push for growth in both generation and distribution, but more aggressively in distribution because “it is the growing end of the business”. CESC’s March quarter net profit at ₹295 crore remained almost unchanged from a year earlier. Revenue grew a tepid 1.7% to ₹1,631 crore from ₹1,604 crore a year ago.
Mobile phone apps took centre stage at Google’s annual developer conference on Wednesday as the search giant announced new features for its digital assistant and its popular photo app while devoting little time to the Android mobile operating system. Addressing an audience of thousands of developers in Mountain View, California, Google executives delivered a broad-based update to their product portfolio which also included a slate of new features for the Google Home speaker, a job search tool and even a set of new virtual reality headsets.
In a sign of the ongoing strategic importance of Google Assistant, the company’s artificial intelligence-driven, voice-controlled digital assistant, Google announced it would make the product available on Apple Inc’s iPhone. What’s more, the assistant will soon be able to complete transactions and supply information about objects captured by the phone’s camera, executives said.
To drive greater usage of its photo app, Google also announced that will now make suggestions to prod users to share images and allow them to order physical photo albums.
Google Ceo Sundar Pichai said the company will expand its search engine with a new jobs tab that will allow candidates to filter postings by criteria such as wages and commute time.
The company also released a host of new features for Google Home, a speaker released last year. Users will soon be able to make phone calls using the device, and the HBO Now streaming service, owned by Time Warner Inc, will be integrated as well.