Blog @ mj

How do you delight customers? What is brand experience? Who are responsible for creating a brand experience? Who are the benefactors? .......

The eco system of business is changing every day in different aspects, and interruption in production and operations is now being recognised as the key contributor to losses both in the topline and bottomline.......

In any communication or branding exercise, the most crucial part is the beginning – identifying the relevant target audience. No communication or branding can have the desired impact without hitting the correct note with the audience.......

The e-commerce market in India has witnessed tremendous growth over the last decade or so. This phenomenal growth can be attributed to a number of factors......

Coal makes up for 29% of global primary energy and 41% of global electricity. China remains the world’s largest market for coal, accounting for nearly half of global coal consumption in 2035. India is also one of the largest growth markets, with its share of world coal demand expected to double, from 10% in 2015 to 20% in 2035, according to industry sources.....

Since the time we learnt to speak and to communicate, there have been publicity and public relations. The whole story is about dissemination of information to the right people with a strategic objective....

A perfect cup of tea goes well beyond how hot the water should be and how long the tea infuses… my perfect cup of tea is also all about the moment, the atmosphere, the place, the comfort of the silence or hustle around you...

Loyalty Programmes typically are marketing interventions aimed at creating greater engagement and brand affinity amongst the buyer and the seller and in the B2B context seem to be apt for organisations which have the following characteristics...

The primary focus of a procurement process in the last several years has been to reduce cost through digitising the process, and most organisations have successfully implemented a well-defined procurement process on an electronic platform. .....

Life in India, in mid-summer, wilts like a drying flower. This year, however, reports of sun-stroke related deaths have been few and far between. .....

Riding on the back of the Bitcoin failure, a quiet digital revolution of sorts is in the offing.....

In the famous United Airlines case, musician Dave Carroll said his guitar was broken while in their custody. ...

Every great achievement, every winning trend and every great discovery or invention was an idea someday....

With e-commerce sales in the Asia Pacific projected to increase at moderate double-digit rates through 2019, it is time to have the right kind of people...

The year 2015-16 saw the mjunction quiz team consisting of Debashish Mukherjee and Abhishek Kar, proving their mettle in the quizzing circuit, both as quizzers as well as ...

Thanks for keeping me in the loop on this. I am not at all surprised that Shri Oberoi has made it to the cover of the magazine. Having interacted with him a few times a few years ago,

In today’s VUCA world adaptability and agility to the fast changing interconnected global economy are required, which can only be provided by systems and processes that take proactive and corrective actions on demand.

As we step on to yet another new year, I wish you a year full of new opportunities and new beginnings.

In the second of this series to mark 10 years of coaljunction, we will highlight how the transparent market price discovery system freed the coal supply chain from the shackles of cartelisation, intermediaries and the infamous mafia.

coaljunction, mjunction’s strategic business unit for online sales of coal, turned 10 in 2015. In order to commemorate this occasion, we will come out with a series of articles on different facets and phases of coaljunction’s evolution. In the first of this series, we recall how coaljunction came to existence.

It was in 2005 that we started the e-auction of coal. This was sorely needed as the unregulated sectors and traders were able to pick up large quantities of coal directly from Coal India at notified prices which were at 50% of the market price. Needless to mention traders were able to make bumper profits by selling coal bought at notified prices to actual consumers at twice the price.

I believe that if one were to be serious about CSR and really do something positive and impactful, the following two conditions first need to be met:

• The leadership of the Corporate passionately believe in wanting to give back to the community without any strings attached. By community, I mean those who are less fortunate than we are.

I have often been asked the question: “What does mjunction do?”

During our younger days, which was in the early 2000s, it was an easy question to answer, which was: “we sell steel online.” Today we are into not only selling steel online but also iron ore, coal, idle and non-performing assets, tea, books, washing machines, jewellery.. and on the drawing board we have timber, coffee and broadband spectrum, to name a few.

The good story is that e-Commerce has started getting coverage that it justly deserves across all the media channels in India. The unfortunate part is that the media confuses e-retail for e-Commerce. E-retail which focuses on sale of consumer products has not really been able to get their act in order and has led to astronomical valuations of some companies despite unbelievable losses which have been over-shadowing many wonderful initiatives

Even as coal shortage continues to plague India Inc. and coal consumers clamour for new linkages, the government has found no takers for the three coal blocks put up for competitive bidding. This raises doubts over the success of similar auctions being planned by the Ministry of Coal (MoC) in the future. It also partly invalidates the arguments put against the earlier policy of free allocation of blocks for captive coal mining.

In line with the surge in recent years, India’s imports of coal and coke crossed 50 million tons (mt) during the first quarter (April-June) of 2014-15 (FY15). Going by the trend, analysts forecast total imports may reach close to 200 mt in FY15, which is about a 10.4% jump over 181 mt imported last year.

Tea is a unique product whose quality could vary depending on diurnal weather conditions. This leads to swings in the price of tea. In India, tea is plucked from over a thousand gardens and produced in several hundred factories daily in summer. The quality starts deteriorating with time and hence it needs to be sold quickly.

With the click and buy mania engulfing the nation, there is a lot to cheer about for Tata group employees. The much awaited mytatastore website is now live and one can order products bearing the Tata logo from this exclusive website, which is owned by Tata Sons. This unique online store will be managed by straightline.in, a unit of mjunction services, and all employees of the group who are registered with the tataworld.com will have access to the site and its products.

Within months of taking over as Managing Director of Tata Steel (India and South East Asia), TV Narendranhas set the ball rolling as far as future growth for the company is concerned. He talks to Tata Review on regulations, the challenges his company faced in the last year, growth prospects for next year, and his focus on making Tata Steel more confident, creative, and collaborative.

Mine contractors’ walk-out may snowball into an issue in 2014-15: S Narsing Rao, former Chairman, Coal India Limited, tells Rakesh Dubey of Coal Insights

In a free-wheeling interview to Rakesh Dubey of Coal Insights, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission of India touches upon various issues in the coal sector.

Coal Secretary P C Parakh, who has had an illustrious career in the government, grabbed the headlines in the latter half of last calendar, but for all the wrong reasons, shares his views in an interview with Rakesh Dubey of Coal Insights.

Steel Insight’s Rakesh Dubey and Tamajit Pain caught up with BSL CEO Anutosh Maitra to get an overview of the plant – a major producer of flat products – and its plans to refurbish its equipment and expand capacity as the steel sector, like other industries at this juncture, is in the doldrums owing to a low demand scenario.