Mumbai, July 30 (IANS) Amid growing demand from the manufacturing sector, warehouse transactions across eight primary markets in India were recorded at 23 million square feet in the first half this year, a report showed on Tuesday.

Almost 55 per cent of these transactions occurred in ‘Grade A’ spaces, led by Mumbai which accounted for 20 per cent of the total warehousing volume, according to the report by Knight Frank India.

“Demand from the manufacturing sector has compensated for the lull in e-commerce and helped broad base the market’s occupier profile,” said Shishir Baijal, Chairman and Managing Director, Knight Frank India.

While the availability of viable land for warehousing development remains a challenge, high institutional interest in this space should enable development of high-quality supply, he added.

Delhi-NCR was the second most prolific market, representing 17 per cent of the total warehousing area transacted during the period, with third-party logistics and manufacturing sectors driving volumes.

Pune was the most expensive warehousing rental market, with average rent at Rs 26 per sq ft a month.

It was followed by Kolkata with a rental rate of Rs 23.8 per sq ft monthly and Mumbai at Rs 23.6 per sq ft a month.

Pune and Chennai showcased a 4 per cent increment in rentals, followed by NCR and Kolkata at 3 per cent YoY growth, said the report.

“India’s robust fiscal position and resilient economy are well-positioned to sustain and enhance the warehousing market’s stability and growth potential for the remainder of fiscal year 2024,” said Baijal.

The country has benefited from the sustained move towards decentralisation of manufacturing capacity with global manufacturing giants such as Apple, Samsung, Foxconn and TSMC expanding their manufacturing base in the country.

–IANS

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New Delhi, July 30 (IANS) Designed and manufactured in India, telecom equipment are now being exported to over 100 countries, the Centre has informed.

Last year, the country exported telecom equipment and services worth more than $18.2 billion.

“Many of our homegrown telecom companies have made their mark in Western nations, including the US, despite fierce global competition,” said Madhu Arora, Member (Technology), Digital Communications Commission, Department of Telecom.

“The Indian Army has recently integrated its first indigenous chip-based 4G mobile base station, developed by our own R&D firms,” she informed.

Addressing the ‘Defence Sector ICT Conclave’ in the national capital where 18 companies showcased their products, Arora said Information and communications technology (ICT) forms the backbone of defence operations.

“India’s vibrant ICT sector, marked by innovation and integrity, has established a significant presence over the past decades. The Indian ICT industry is providing solutions to the world, showcasing India’s leadership in this domain,” the senior official remarked.

Abhishek Singh, Joint Secretary in the Ministry of External Affairs, said the MEA is actively working to enhance cooperation with Africa in the ICT sector.

“By focusing on emerging technologies like AI and blockchain, we aim to address specific challenges faced by African countries,” he noted.

India has emerged as one of the top five investors in Africa, with cumulative investments of around $75 billion.

Several Indian companies have been instrumental in driving digital transformation across the continent.

According to Sandeep Aggarwal, Immediate Past Chairman, Telecom Equipment & Services Export Promotion Council (TEPC), ICT is critical for maintaining the sovereignty and integrity of India.

India, with its long-standing cooperation and respect for African sovereignty, is a reliable partner in this field.

“Our expertise in data analytics and artificial intelligence empowers our defence forces with predictive insights and actionable intelligence, enhancing decision-making and operational effectiveness in the front,” Aggarwal mentioned.

–IANS

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San Francisco, July 30 (IANS) Tech giant Apple has responded to certain allegations regarding its AI models, saying it takes precautions at every stage — including design, model training, feature development, and quality evaluation — to identify how its AI tools may be misused or lead to potential harm.

The company said in a technical paper that it will continuously and proactively “improve our AI tools with the help of user feedback”.

It last month revealed Apple Intelligence that will offer several generative AI features in iOS, macOS and iPadOS software over the next few months.

“The pre-training data set consists of… data we have licensed from publishers, curated publicly available or open-sourced datasets and publicly available information crawled by our web crawler, Applebot,” Apple wrote.

Given our focus on protecting user privacy, we note that no private Apple user data is included in the data mixture, the company added.

According to the technical paper, training data for the Apple Foundation Models (AFM) was sourced in a “responsible” way.

Apple Intelligence is designed with the company’s core values at every step and built on a foundation of industry-lead privacy protection.

“Additionally, we have created Responsible AI principles to guide how we develop AI tools, as well as the models that underpin them,” said the iPhone maker.

The company further said that no private Apple user data is included in the data mixture.

“Additionally, extensive efforts have been made to exclude profanity, unsafe material, and personally identifiable information from publicly available data. Rigorous decontamination is also performed against many common evaluation benchmarks,” Apple elaborated.

To train its AI models, the company crawl publicly available information using its web crawler, Applebot and “respect the rights of web publishers to opt out of Applebot using standard robots.txt directives”.

“We take steps to exclude pages containing profanity and apply filters to remove certain categories of personally identifiable information (PII). The remaining documents are then processed by a pipeline which performs quality filtering and plain-text extraction,” Apple emphasised.

–IANS

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New Delhi, July 29 (IANS) The mining sector reforms introduced by the Centre have turned out to be “instrumental” in augmenting the production of key minerals in the country, Union Minister of Coal and Mines G. Kishan Reddy told the Parliament on Monday.

The production of iron ore has doubled from 129 million tonnes in 2014-15 to 258 million tonnes in 2022-23 while the production of limestone has jumped by 37.6 per cent from 295 million tonnes in 2014-15 to 406 million tonnes in 2022-23, the minister told the Rajya Sabha in a written reply.

The gross value added (GVA) of the mining sector now accounts for 2 per cent of the country’s GDP and the contribution of the mining & quarrying sector in value terms has increased from Rs 2,90,411 crore in 2014-15 to Rs 3,18,302 crores in 2022-23, he added.

The minister also stated that as a result of the reforms implemented by the Central government, a total of 385 mineral blocks have been auctioned in the country since the introduction of the auction regime in 2015. Out of these, 50 mines are already in production.

The Ministry of Mines has taken various steps to increase the share of domestic mining in total mineral consumption by increasing mineral production and to make ‘Aatmanirbhar Bharat in the mining sector’.

The Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Act, 1957 (MMDR Act, 1957) was amended with effect from March 28, 2021, with the objective of inter-alia increasing mineral production and time-bound operationalisation of mines, increasing employment and investment in the mining sector; increasing the pace of exploration and auction of mineral resources, the minister added.

Some of the key amendments include removing end-use restrictions for the auction of mines, allowing captive mines to sell up to 50 per cent of minerals produced during the year after meeting the requirement of linked plant and removing restrictions on the transfer of mineral concessions. The MMDR Act, 1957 was further amended through the MMDR Amendment Act, 2023 with effect from August 17, 2023, with the objective of increasing exploration and production of critical and deep-seated minerals which are essential for the advancement of many sectors, including high-tech electronics, telecommunications, transport and defence, Reddy added.

–IANS

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New Delhi, July 29 (IANS) Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Limited (HPCL) on Monday reported a consolidated net profit of Rs 634 crore during the first quarter 2024-15 compared to 6,766 crore during 1Q FY24.

The standalone net profit during this quarter was Rs 356 crore compared to 6,204 crore during 1QFY24.

“The primary reasons for the lower net profit are suppressed marketing margins on select petroleum products and reduced refining margins,” according to an HPCL statement.

The average gross refining margin (GRM) for 1QFY25 was $5.03 per barrel ($7.44 per barrel during 1QFY24).

The reduction in GRMs is primarily due to lower cracks in line with the trend of international product cracks.

HPCL standalone revenue from operations was Rs 1,20,859 crore during the first quarter of FY25 compared to Rs 1,19,044 crore during 1QFY24.

The public sector oil major maintained a robust physical performance during the quarter.

HPCL refineries recorded a crude thruput of 5.76 MMT (million metric tonnes) during 1QFY25 registering an increase of 6.7 per cent over the thruput of 5.40 MMT during 1QFY24 despite planned shutdown in refineries.

Widening the company’s crude basket, HPCL refineries processed Imported crude from Khafji and Varandey, and indigenous crude from the eastern offshore KGDWN field for the first time.

HPCL recorded the highest-ever quarterly sales volume of 12.63 MMT (including exports) during 1QFY25 registering a growth of 6.6 per cent against 11.85 MMT during 1QFY24.

The company also achieved market share gain of 0.25 per cent among PSU Oil Marketing Companies during the period, according to the company statement.

During 1QFY25, sale of Motor fuels was 8.02 MMT (growth of 2.7 per cent over 1QFY24) and in case of LPG, the company achieved a sales volume of 2.07 MMT (growth of 8.7 per cent over 1QFY24).

The aviation business of the company recorded a robust growth of 31.3 per cent over 1QFY24 with sales volume of 261 TMT during 1QFY25.

New aviation refuelling facility at Kanpur was commissioned during the quarter, taking the total count to 55.

In the highly competitive lubricants business, HPCL’s sales were 152 TMT during 1QFY25, (growth of 3.1 per cent over 1QFY24), the company added.

During 1QFY25, the company recorded its highest-ever petrochemical sales of 30.3 TMT and introduced new grade HDPE Raffia in the polymer segment.

The oil major also recorded its highest-ever pipeline thruput of 6.83 MMT during 1QFY25 (growth of 5.2 per cent over 1QFY24), it added.

HPCL also said that it invested Rs 2,017 crore during 1QFY25 to further strengthen its refining and marketing infrastructure, including its equity investment in joint ventures and subsidiary companies.

–IANS

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