Articles by Sunny Sen
Now, book travel tickets, order food on Snapdeal
Snapdeal, India’s second-largest e-commerce company, has stitched alliances with online food ordering firm Zomato, and online travel and ticketing firms Cleartrip and Redbus, but without investing in them

All you need to know about Ola, Uber surge pricing in 5 points
Taxi aggregator service Uber has been operating in India for almost two years without anyone bothering about ‘surge pricing’ -- where cab fares multiple with rising demand.

For LeEco, the battle for marketshare is more about videos, not phones
Atul Jain opens an app on his LeEco smartphone. The screen shows a cluster of television channels. Jain, the head of LeEco (India) clicks on one of them – it buffers, the 4G connection is patchy, but it works. “It works perfectly fine on 3G as well... You don’t have to be in front of your television anymore to see your favourite serial, or a live cricket match,” he said.

How MapmyIndia turned to e-com to counter Google
MapmyIndia started geo-tagging homes to facilitate deliveries; e-com now makes up 25% of its revenues

Blackstone left nothing unturned to bag Mphasis
The $1.1-billion deal shows the PE fund, which has made big bets on real estate, is eager to grow its tech portfolio. That should not surprise anyone who knows the reality of realty

Micromax bets on payments biz with mobile wallet UDIO
With a number of e-wallets such as Paytm, Mobikwik and Freecharge already in the market, Micromax is betting on UDIO to be a differentiator

Oyo Rooms raises $100 million from Softbank, others
The business of hotel aggregation is not new, but the entry of players such as Oyo and Zo have also got incumbent online travel agencies, including Makemytrip, Cleartrip, Expedia and Yatra, worried

With Rs 330 crore in pocket, Shopclues goes shopping
In the next couple of weeks, ShopClues will close its acquisition of Momoe, the wallet company. The Momoe deal is not only to get a play in the wallet business, but it will have a larger role in the unicorn’s future. It will help ShopClues’ merchants to do mobile banking, a service that is not yet available on the platform, while offering a wallet service like that of Snapdeal and Paytm.

As market shifts to petrol, carmakers struggle with diesel capacity
Just four years ago, the country was in the grip of a diesel drive. Price decontrol of the fuel and greater green concerns have since led to a turnaround, and auto makers have been left clutching at straws with demand rapidly shifting to petrol

Beyond phones: Xiaomi wants to be an Internet major
Xiaomi vice-president Hugo Barra wants the company to evolve in India with a combination of devices, community and services. Phones are aplenty. In days to come Hungama will have exclusive content on Xiaomi phones -- videos, music, games and value-added services. And maybe investments in areas of healthcare and education

Superplex to be the next blockbuster for PVR and the Bijli brothers
Ajay Bijli had very little to do with the business of cinema while growing up. His family was in the transport business. But they also owned the Priya cinema hall in New Delhi’s Vasant Vihar area. Ajay used to watch back-to-back shows, sometimes of the same movie, at Priya. He soon fell in love with cinema.

Snapdeal’s Bahl vs Flipkart’s Bansal: All’s not well with etailers
The Twitter spat is nowhere close to battle that Ambani and Wadia fought, but Bansal and Bahl have started feeling the heat and pressure from investors. In its last round of fund raising Snapdeal was valued at $6.5 billion, lesser than its GMV of $7 billion. That’s unusual.

Cab clash: Uber sues Ola for ‘bogus’ bookings, seeks Rs 49 crore in damages for tarnished image
Uber claims Ola booked rides and cancelled them, and created thousands of fake accounts on its app

It’s more about Max, less Micro for Rahul Sharma
Rahul Sharma still feels bad that his father never bought him a motorcycle. He first asked for it in the 10th standard. Much later, the father got him a scooter, whose memory still makes Sharma scoff.

Updated on Mar 21, 2016 08:29 AM IST
Hindustan Times | , New Delhi
Suveen Sinha and Sunny SenUber, Ola losing sheen in India as driver incomes fall
Taxi aggregators improved the lifestyles of cab drivers, but now there are too many of them, while the pie -- in the form of cab-users -- has only gotten smaller

Small merchants find bankers in e-tailers
Some merchants have raised up to Rs 5 crore, while the average loan value is Rs 20 lakh

For new shoppers, Shopclues goes to villages
It wasn’t a usual order Shopclues receives. It was from this small village named Raliang village in Jowai district in Meghalaya – a Samsung LED television. The village has hours of power cuts and

For online tickets, there is only one showstopper
An idea that germinated in the wilds of South Africa and burst with the dotcom bubble in Y2K, Bookmyshow is alive and kicking today, thank you very much

Commercial vehicles driving back with a bang
In 2011, sales of commercial vehicles (CVs) peaked. And then it fell, to almost half in 2013. It was the “worst recession ever for CVs,” recalled Volvo Eicher Motor’s MD and CEO Siddhartha Lal. Ashok Leyland MD Vinod K Dasari referred to it as the “perfect storm”.

E-grocers struggling to get the right model in India
Thin margins have forced a lot of grocery delivery startups to shut shop in India.

Xiaomi changes tactics to woo Indian users, moves beyond flash sales
Company says it has got 75% local manufacturing, though much of this is assembly

Micromax founders forced back to helm the company as sales plunge
The return of Rahul Sharma and Vikas Jain to Micromax and the departures of its chief executive seem to suggest that some companies may be best managed by founders, rather than professional CEOs

Maruti hikes prices by up to Rs 34,494 to offset infra cess impact
Maruti Suzuki India on Thursday hiked prices of its vehicles across models by up to Rs 34,494 in order to offset the impact of infrastructure cess proposed in the Union Budget 2016-17.

How women founders are breaking gender shackles
Anisha Singh was two months pregnant when she started Mydala.com, a website that offers deals online. People thought she was crazy. Maybe she was.

Restaurant reservation apps have diners calling for more
A bunch of restaurant reservation apps such as DineOut, EazyDiner and Tablewalla have mushroomed, offering attractive deals and discounts.

After the bubble, job cuts arrive at e-commerce companies
After a rush to get funding and increase headcounts, a number of startups have been firing employees in the past few months. More than a thousand workers have lost their jobs in the layoffs.

How yoga guru Ramdev turned FMCG business on its head with ‘upkar’
Ramdev’s inputs are not limited to product concepts. He made it a point to fill his purchase department with ascetics because he thinks they are too honest to steal.

Paytm appoints payments bank CEO
Vijay Shekhar Sharma was not in a hurry to appoint the head of the payments bank business. He didn’t want to make any decision in haste, after all payments bank is Sharma’s trump card. “We will bring wealth and money management on to the mobile,” the CEO and founder of Paytm, had told HT earlier.

Paytm targets credit and debit cards in big offline retail push
Vijay Shekhar Sharma has a rival, and it is big — cash. The founder and CEO of Paytm, India’s largest mobile wallet company is looking to take his battle to cash transactions, and wants to take over 30% of these this year.

Snapdeal still has a long way to go to overtake Flipkart: Experts
It was not long ago that Kunal Bahl, CEO and co-founder of Snapdeal, announced that by the end of the current fiscal, that is 2015-16, his company will overtake Flipkart as India’s largest e-commerce company.
