Air Asia to Fly to India

Datuk Tony Fernandes continued to expand Air Asia's empire, and today he declared that his mission as CEO is done!

I am wondering what it indirectly implies? Does it mean that he is leaving Air Asia?

He was saying that after Air Asia secured their last target - India and would commence flight on 1st December. This completed the picture of ASEAN, Hong Kong, China, Australia and now India. He is saying that the rest of expansion beyond that would be for Air Asia-X to do it. Is he implying that he would be focusing more on Air Asia X?

For full article, do go here .

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KUALA LUMPUR: AirAsia has finally conquered its “last frontier” with the Indian Government giving the low-cost carrier approval to fly to India.

AirAsia chief executive officer Datuk Tony Fernandes said the airline would start selling tickets to Tiruchi in Tamil Nadu at midnight on Wednesday with the first flight to take off on Dec 1 at 7.40am.

“It will be a daily flight and we are looking at even adding a second flight now as the initial response has been tremendous,” he told reporters Monday during a press conference here.

Special promotional prices for the flight will cost RM49 one-way while the normal ticket price will cost about RM200 one-way.

Fernandes said plans are now in the works for the next one and a half years to fly to many more destinations in India including Madras, Madurai and Kochi with AirAsia.

“AirAsia-X meanwhile will fly to places like New Dehli, Bombay, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Calcutta,” he added.

He said AirAsia would initially invest between RM5mil to RM7mil to set up infrastructure in India and he is confident that it will do well.

“This is an exciting period for us and I’m looking at a high load factor of at least 90% for our first flight,” he said.

Fernandes said it had taken the airline seven years to reach this stage and with India now in its pocket, his mission as CEO is complete.

“I had said then that India would be the last place we need to get to. It is now over to AirAsia-X to grow the business to Japan, South Korea, Europe and the United States.”

Fernandes said he expects a huge growth in Indian tourism in Malaysia and that he is not worried about the global economic slowdown.

“I believe that you have to be innovative. While other airlines are cutting back we are expanding and can take up their slack.

“Maybe some of the population in India cannot afford to fly with us, but there are many more who can and this is the market we are after,” he said.

Fernandes also said, in response to recent Malaysia Airlines (MAS) advertisements, that his battle with MAS is over and that it is time to move on.





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TM International now with big stake in huge telco in India

Telekom Malaysia International (TMI) is making further inroads in India.

Quoting from Reuters

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NEW DELHI/KUALA LUMPUR, June 25 (Reuters) - Malaysia's TM International (TMIT.KL: Quote, Profile, Research) will pick up around a fifth of Indian mobile operator Idea Cellular (IDEA.BO: Quote, Profile, Research), bolstering its presence in the world's fastest-growing mobile market, after a takeover of a smaller Indian firm in which it held a stake.

Idea, India's fifth-largest mobile operator, said on Wednesday it will buy a 40.8 percent stake in smaller rival Spice Telecom (SPCM.BO: Quote, Profile, Research) for 21.76 billion rupees ($508 million).

TM International's 39.2 percent stake in Spice will be converted into Idea shares, and it will pay 72.9 billion rupees ($1.7 billion) for a preferential allotment of 14.99 percent. TM International is a unit of Telekom Malaysia (TLMM.KL: Quote, Profile, Research).

India's mobile market is the world's second-largest after China and foreign firms are keen to enter the market. Last year, Vodafone Plc (VOD.L: Quote, Profile, Research) paid $11 billion for a controlling stake in the No. 3 cellular operator.

"We have a 39.2 percent stake in a company which (covers a) population of 80 million. Now we will have an around 20 percent stake in a company which has 700 million," Yusof Annuar Yaacob, group chief financial officer at TM International, told Reuters in Kuala Lumpur.

"For us, it's a much better position to move forward with our business," he said, adding the deal was expected to be completed by April 2009.

Idea, along with TM International, will make a mandatory open offer for another 20 percent of Spice at 77.3 rupees per share, the same price it will pay Spice's founders for their stake. The price is a 42 percent premium to Tuesday's close.

Spice shares, which listed last July, surged 33.1 percent to a record close of 72.35 rupees in a market that rose 0.8 percent.

MINORITY PARTNER

Idea said TM International would remain a minority partner.

"We have a very clear understanding. Telekom Malaysia will not go above 20 percent. So there is a cap there. They have one board seat," Chairman Kumar Mangalam Birla told a news conference.

Idea, part of the Aditya Birla Group, operates in 11 of India's 22 telecoms circles or service areas, and has approval for the other 11.

It said the deal gave it ready-made entry to the Punjab and Karnataka circles, which account for 11 percent of the Indian market, and the TM International investment would support its aggressive growth plans.

"It takes Idea very clearly into a very high-growth trajectory and into the big league," Birla said, adding Idea planned capital expenditure of 100 billion rupees over the next two years.

Idea also said would use the Malaysian firm's 3G expertise.

A combined Idea-Spice would have more than 30 million subscribers. Bharti Airtel (BRTI.BO: Quote, Profile, Research) is India's top mobile operator with 64.4 million subscribers at the end of April, followed by Reliance Communications (RLCM.BO: Quote, Profile, Research) with 47.4 million.

Vodafone-controlled Vodafone Essar has 45.8 million subscribers and state-run Bharat Sanchar Nigam has 41.3 million. Idea is buying its stake from Spice's founders, the Modi family, who said TM International had been pushing for the deal.

"The deal has been the brainchild of Telekom Malaysia," Spice Chairman Bhupendra Kumar Modi told NDTV television.

"They are the one who wanted stake in an all-India company. It was Telekom Malaysia who put all the puzzles together to make the deal happen."

Idea Cellular shares ended up 2.9 percent at 102.05 rupees, while TM International shares were suspended from trading in Kuala Lumpur ahead of the announcement.

DSP Merrill Lynch acted as the financial adviser to Idea, and Lazard was the financial adviser to TM International. Enam Securities and Lehman Brothers advised the Modi family. ($1=42.8 rupees) (Additional reporting by Rakesh Sharma and C.J. Kuncheria in NEW DELHI and Narayanan Somasundaram in MUMBAI; Editing by John Mair and Lincoln Feast)





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Accenture Hiring in India

My former employer, Accenture, has been doing very well in India, ramping up thousands and thousands of employees.

Business Week wrote about them here

Full quotation of the article below
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The Analysis: Learning from Accenture

The author of Talent on Demand talks about what the consulting company did right in ramping up in India, and what it could have done better

Accenture's story is important in a lot of ways. Having to go to a new country or a new market and ramp up very quickly is something that a lot of companies are facing today. Sometimes it happens because you go to a new market where you haven't been before. Having to go to a new country or a new market and make changes to your talent pool is something a lot of companies are facing today.

This is different from 20 years or so ago, when demand was quite predictable. Then, you could more or less forecast 10 years out and determine what you were going to need on the talent side. Now these things change very quickly, and companies have to ramp up very quickly and scale back very quickly. It places huge demands on forecasting.

I think Accenture did a good job of getting up to speed very quickly in India. They did a lot of things right: They reached out to the community in various ways in terms of branding. They created their own human resources academy—a way to get the infrastructure necessary to get a lot of people in quickly and move them up. And they centralized their operations to get some scale economies and avoid duplications. All that is good.

The Cost of Being Wrong
There are some other things companies can think about. The first is to think about the difficulty in making these forecasts. These are huge bets and the human capital issues are a big part of it. Rather than just guessing and saying, "I think our best estimate is going to be we need this many people," a good idea is to develop some scenarios; some alternative versions of what we think we're really going to need. Often, we're guessing. We don't know for sure what demand is going to be. How many people do we think we're going to need? What are the odds of getting this many people? What happens if this assumption is wrong or that assumption is wrong? You end up tracing out something like a probability distribution, and saying, "Here are the odds it will be this much or that much." As a result, you get a much better sense of what the real demands will be, and you're less likely to make big mistakes.

The other way is one that comes directly out of supply chains. This is what I've been working on with my book, Talent on Demand. This is thinking about things like the cost of being wrong. Think about what happens if we have too many workers. What happens if we don't have enough? There are costs on both sides, and you want to try to minimize both of those.

I think another thing Accenture did that's interesting and that all companies need to focus on is different ways of attracting employees. They focused more on hiring people, but there are other approaches to getting employees which are more inspired by "just-in-time" supply chain logistics. It's more expensive per unit, but it helps you reduce the uncertainty. Relying on temporary workers and contract workers can help you close the gap with a little less risk.

Managing Bottlenecks
Another part of this is not just bringing people on—it's also getting that many people up to speed once you bring them in and developing them inside the company. Centralizing here is a good approach. Often companies have different units that are each hiring, and each unit makes mistakes. Maybe this unit has too many people or this one has too few people. If you're centralizing all this, you can use a portfolio approach. Some have too many, some have not enough. It cancels out.

I think there's another supply chain issue as well—managing bottlenecks. How many people can we actually bring on at one time? One of the ways companies can get better at this is to try to smooth out the process of bringing people in rather than hiring everyone all at once, say, right at graduation time. To do that, you need a huge capacity of onboarding for helping people get up to speed with the company's culture and for training and developing them. If you could hire even twice a year, then you need only half the capacity, half the training positions, half the supervisory time. Thinking about talent management like a supply chain, and bringing in some of a supply chain's lessons, can apply to moving people in and out of an organization.

Peter Cappelli is the author of Talent on Demand: Managing Talent in an Age of Uncertainty, published by Harvard Business Press. He is the George W. Taylor Professor of Management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and the director of Wharton's Center for Human Resources.

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What you guys think of the policy of Accenture hiring in India? Do you think they hire fast enough? or they hire too fast? What would be the impact if there is a slowdown there? What is the best way to mitigate?

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JobStreet foray in India

Another new JobStreet innovation. This article is quoted in India.

Quoting from Sify.com

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Job portals don social networking colours
Priyanka Golikeri/ DNA MONEY
Tuesday, 01 April , 2008, 08:27
Last Updated: Tuesday, 01 April , 2008, 08:54

For Priya Sharma, a 23-year-old M. Com student from Mumbai University, job search has become more attractive than what it was when her sister went job hunting about three years ago. Then, a click of the mouse would throw open a homepage listing the number of vacancies in different industries.

"But now, it's more than just finding the number of vacancies in each sector and pasting resumes accordingly. It incorporates a whole host of value-added services that make online job search more appealing," says the Thane resident.

Well what she means is that you can send the CV to the prospective employer through a mobile phone, get interviewed online, or even enter into discussions with other online job seekers.

A thriving job market is making portals give much more than the usual services that were offered a few years ago, says Anand Iyer, chief executive officer of Jobstreet.com.

According to a survey by Chennai based human resource consulting firm Ma Foi Consultants, about 1 million new jobs are likely to be created this year in the organised sector.

"I'm sure nearly half of these jobs are in the 0-8 years experience bracket. And generally, people in this segment are the ones who track jobs through portals. This is because they have a greater risk taking appetite than those in the above 10 years experience bracket and look for quick jumps," Iyer says.

According to Sanjeev Bikhchandani, co-founder and CEO of Naukri.com, the turnover of online job portals is estimated to touch Rs 325 crore in 2008, up from about Rs 240 crore last fiscal. "The online job market, which includes about 500 big and small portals, is witnessing a growth of 30% per annum. This spells huge opportunities to tap more job seekers via introduction of inventive approaches."

As per a survey in 2007 by staffing solutions company Kelly Services, about 40% of the 3,000 working professionals who were interviewed had got jobs through online portals. "Other than companies, recruitment agencies like us often post our requirements on portals," says Vishal Chhiber, head-HR, Kelly Services.

Jobstreet recently introduced a feature through which a job seeker who is registered with the portal can forward his resume to the email ID of a recruiter by SMSing APPLY, followed by the recruiter's ID. "The SMS service will recognise the mobile number as that of a registered member of Jobstreet and email the resume from website's database to the company applied to," says Iyer.

The website has also classified jobs in three different sections on the basis of industry, specialisation and location. Iyer says the additions would make the site user friendly and help in doubling the daily traffic of 4,000-8,000 users currently.

WhereIsMyBoss.com, or WIMB has introduced online video interviewing to ensure that time and distance cease to be impediments for conducting job interviews. Naveen Chander, chief operating officer, WIMB, says, "The candidate and recruiter can log on to the site at a scheduled time and the interview can be conducted through a webcam."

According to Vikramjit Singh Sahaye, country manager of Yellojobs.com, the site is planning to introduce a service in mid-April through which users can interact with each other by participating in forums and discussions about jobs and vacancies. "This would make it like a social networking site and enhance its appeal."

Naukri.com and recruitment consulting company Careernet are planning to introduce niche sites targeted at education seekers and companies wanting to recruit freshers.

Naukri will start an education site called Shiksha in June where students can seek career options from universities, computer training institutes, and colleges. "Students can get to know the different courses and number of seats available in each of the institutes listed on the site," says Bikhchandani.

Similarly, Careernet is launching a campus network in mid-April for companies seeking freshers.

"The site would target entry-level candidates. Companies wanting freshers can publish their requirements online and students can accordingly seek jobs that match their skill sets," says founder and CEO Rishi Das.





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Click here to read more of Chen Chow's posts

Would encourage any of my blog readers to share with me any event that you come across. As long as the event/activity/initiative is education/charity/youth oriented and is not-for-profit, I would be more than happy to post it to share!