Will Zomato takeover UberEats?

News Network
December 16, 2019

New Delhi, Dec 16: The online food delivery industry in India is set for a big churn as Uber has reportedly entered advanced stages of talks to sell UberEat's India business to rival Zomato by the end of this year.

According to a TechCrunch report on Monday citing sources, the deal "currently values UberEats' India business at around $400 million".

As part of the deal, "Uber may invest between $150 to $200 million in Zomato", the report claimed, citing sources.

As an event in Delhi earlier this month, Zomato Founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal said the company is aiming to raise up to $600 million in a new funding round.

When contacted, Zomato said it "does not comment on rumours or speculations".

Despite arriving in the Indian market in 2017, UberEats has not made enough inroads in the online food delivery segment.

Zomato is currently delivering 1.3 million orders a day from 150,000 restaurants across India at more than 10 orders per restaurant per day.

Swiggy has expanded its services to 500 cities in India, matching rival Zomato's reach in the country. Swiggy, which has added 60,000 new restaurants in the past six months, said in October it would expand to 600 cities by December 2019.

Since April 2019, Swiggy has increased the number of restaurant partners by almost 1.8 times to 1.4 lakh restaurants currently. In tier-3 and tier-4 cities specifically, Swiggy has onboarded over 15,000 restaurants in the last six months.

The market is piping hot as according to a recent study by business consultancy firm Market Research Future, the online food ordering market in India is likely to grow at over 16 per cent annually to touch $17.02 billion by 2023.

UberEats last week launched its operations in Cuttack, its second city in Orissa, saying it Awill partner with a number of local restaurants such as Mirchi, Biryani Box, DFC Dada's Biryani, Burger Adda Factory.

In a recent interaction, UberEats told IANS that it is not only going to stay put in the growing food tech industry in India but is also building strong linkages with restaurant partners for a seamless delivery experience for its customers.

"Right now, we are more focused on delivery with the restaurant partners. We are learning in the India market and making our mark in that space before we can add anything more to it," said Bansi Kotecha who is Head of Operations, Uber Eats.

The deal is reportedly in the works as merger reports of Bengaluru-based Swiggy and Gurugram-based Zomato -- two biggest players in the burgeoning online food delivery market - have also resurfaced.

The merger talks between the two food delivery platforms have revived as the competition is set to grow with Amazon's reported expansion into online food delivery business in the country.

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News Network
February 21,2020

London, Feb 21: Scientists have discovered a new species of land snail, and have named it Craspedotropis Greta Thunberg in honour of the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg for her efforts to raise awareness about climate change.

According to the study, published in the Biodiversity Data Journal, the newly discovered species belongs to the so-called caenogastropods -- a group of land snails known to be sensitive to drought, temperature extremes, and forest degradation.

The scientists, including evolutionary ecologist Menno Schilthuizen from Naturalis Biodiversity Center in the Netherlands, said the snails were found very close to the research field station at Kuala Belalong Field Studies Centre in Brunei.

They added that the snails were discovered at the foot of a steep hill-slope, next to a river bank, foraging at night on the green leaves of understorey plants.

The effort aided by amateur scientist J.P. Lim, who found the first individual of the snail said, "Naming this snail after Greta Thunberg is our way of acknowledging that her generation will be responsible for fixing problems that they did not create."

"And it's a promise that people from all generations will join her to help," Lim said.

The researchers said they approached Thunberg who said that she would be "delighted" to have this species named after her.

The study work including, fieldwork, morphological study, and classification of identified specimen was carried out in a field centre with basic equipment and no internet access, the scientists said.

According to the study, the work was done by untrained ‘citizen scientists’ guided by experts, on a 10-day taxon expedition.

"While we are aware that this way of working has its limitations in terms of the quality of the output (for example, we were unable to perform dissections or to do extensive literature searches), the benefits include rapid species discovery and on-site processing of materials," the researchers wrote in the study.

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Agencies
July 19,2020

New Delhi, Jul 19: Three of the 10 most valued companies added a total of Rs 98,622.89 crore to their market valuation last week, led by stellar gains in IT major Infosys.

Seven companies from the coveted list witnessed a decline in their market valuation last week, but their cumulative loss of Rs 37,701.1 crore was less than the total gain made by three firms -- Reliance Industries Limited, Hindustan Unilever Limited and Infosys.

The market capitalisation of Infosys zoomed Rs 52,046.87 crore to Rs 3,85,027.58 crore. Shares of Infosys had rallied over 9 per cent on Thursday after the company posted a stronger-than-expected 12.4 per cent rise in the first quarter consolidated net profit.

Hindustan Unilever Limited added Rs 25,751.07 crore in its market valuation which stood at Rs 5,48,232.26 crore at close on Friday. Reliance Industries' m-cap jumped Rs 20,824.95 crore to Rs 12,11,682.08 crore.

In contrast, HDFC's valuation plunged Rs 13,920.21 crore to Rs 3,13,269.70 crore and that of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) declined Rs 7,617.34 crore to Rs 8,26,031.21 crore.

The valuation of ICICI Bank tumbled Rs 4,205.71 crore to Rs 2,29,156.24 crore and that of Kotak Mahindra Bank by Rs 4,175.28 crore to Rs 2,62,864.37 crore.

Bharti Airtel's m-cap dipped Rs 4,009.83 crore to Rs 3,09,521.05 crore and HDFC Bank's by Rs 3,403.97 crore to Rs 6,03,463.97 crore.

The valuation of ITC declined by Rs 368.76 crore to Rs 2,38,469.29 crore.

In the ranking of top-10 firms, RIL was at the number one rank followed by TCS, HDFC Bank, HUL, Infosys, HDFC, Bharti Airtel, Kotak Mahindra Bank, ITC and ICICI Bank.

During the last week, the 30-share BSE index advanced 425.81 points or 1.16 per cent.

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Agencies
June 26,2020

Facebook will introduce a new notification screen on its platform that will warn users if the article they are about to share is over 90 days old, the company announced on Thursday.

“We’re starting to globally roll out a notification screen that will let people know when news articles they are about to share are more than 90 days old,” Facebook wrote in a blog post.

The social media platform had previously introduced a context button in 2018 that provides information about the sources of articles in the News Feed. Building upon that, the new feature will inform users about the timeliness of the article.

“To ensure people have the context they need to make informed decisions about what to share on Facebook, the notification screen will appear when people click the share button on articles older than 90 days, but will allow people to continue sharing if they decide an article is still relevant,” Facebook said.

The social media giant stated that timeliness is important in understanding the context of an article and curbing the spread of misinformation on the platform.

“News publishers, in particular, have expressed concerns about older stories being shared on social media as current news, which can misconstrue the state of current events. Some news publishers have already taken steps to address this on their own websites by prominently labelling older articles to prevent outdated news from being used in misleading ways,” Facebook added.

Apart from this, the platform will also be testing a similar notification screen for information related to the global Covid-19 pandemic. The notification screen will provide information about the source of the link shared in a post if the link is related to information on Covid-19. It will also direct people to its previously introduced Covid-19 information centre for “authoritative” health information, it said.

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