Summary: Singapore Airlines and Tata group are in talks, exploring the viability of merging Vistara and Air India. While Air India is fully owned by Tatas, Vistara is a joint venture of the Indian conglomerate and its Singapore partner. So, if materialised, what will this merger mean for Tata’s aviation ambition? Aviation sector as a whole is still wading through troubled waters. A recent report has put the domestic industry’s loss in the range of Rs 15,000-17,000 crore this fiscal. RBI, on the other hand, has also been in a fire fighting mode. The details of RBI’s September Monetary Policy Committee meeting were made public on Friday. Ashima Goyal was the only dissenting MPC member who pitched for a 35 basis point rate hike while RBI raised rates by 50 points. Business Standard’s Bhaskar Dutta caught up with her. Moving on to markets, IPOs of small-and-medium enterprises or SMEs have become quite a phenomenon recently with firms heading to primary markets in large numbers. Despite weakness in the secondary markets, many of these IPOs have delivered premium returns. So should investors exercise caution before jumping on the bandwagon? Staying with the markets theme, anchor investors are offered shares in an IPO a day ahead of its primary market debut. But they cannot offload it for the next 30 days. It is called the lock-in period. Various other investment options come with similar riders. This episode of the podcast tells more about it.
