A reporter, a foreign correspondent, an overseas bureau chief, a deputy editor, a managing editor, an editor and publisher-and now Chief Executive! That's a splendid career graph and it belongs to John Ridding, CEO of Financial Times.

Trent has plodded on for a decade to crawl up to sales of a little under Rs 1,000 crore. But Noel Tata's two crucial decisions-with regard to profitability and private labels- ensure it is the most viable model in organised retailing today.

The only one with the coveted family name to be heading a group business, Noel N. Tata is seen as one of the more likely candidates to step into Ratan Tata's shoes. But has he done enough?

Hypermarkets, supermarkets, convenience stores, specialty stores, rural business hubs?Reliance is on a retailing blitzkrieg, but is it on the right track?

With Croma,Westside,Titan and Tanishq stores, and much more, the Tatas have a formidable retail presence.

He has a head start in retail, but Kishore Biyani may have already begun to gravitate towards his next big squeeze: Financial services.

Hindustan Unilever is on a roll again. That HUL has been finally able to stoke up the growth embers, improve profitability, regain market shares, and grow fledgling markets in the past three years, are significant indicators of its business success. But that doesn't make new CEO Nitin Paranjpe's mandate—to pump up HUL's mojo in highly competitive markets—any easier. Business Today's Brian Carvalho reports.

Two decades after testing Indian waters, the Hindujas are once again in investment mode in India. They’re planning to pump at least $50 billion into a number of sectors in the next five to seven years. That's not too little, but are they too late? Brian Carvalho tells us the inside story.

India’s handful of innovation-driven pharma companies are running through hundreds of crores of rupees in their endeavour to put a new drug on the global market. There have been a few setbacks along the way, but nobody’s giving up—not yet.

On the fringes of Mumbai, in what’s known as Navi or New Mumbai, lies Mahape. One of the 226-odd functional industrial areas chalked out by the Maharashtra Industrial Corporation (MIDC) in the state is sprawled over this suburb.

They spent their youth scrounging for stray scraps of the good life in the wilderness of the pre-liberalisation days. But that’s okay: Today, a chunk of this generation is older, wiser, richer—and furiously catching up with life as it should have been.

In mid-October, at the annual general meeting (AGM) of Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL), Chairman Mukesh Ambani talked about five “fundamental strategic shifts” that were under way at this petrochemicals & refining Goliath.

Ten years ago, Barry Bateman realised, there was space for a new global consumer finance brand. A decade down the line, Fidelity International is managing assets of $299.4 billion outside the America with a sizeable presence in Asia-Pacific. As Bateman explains, India and China will be Fidelity’s growth drivers over the next 15-20 years.

Daimlerchrysler isn’t doing too badly for itself in India, cantering along at a growth rate of 22 per cent (till August) in 2007, having sold 1,385 Mercedes-Benz cars in India.