TMS Ep73: Hospitality sector, CP Gurnani, RBL Bank, Vaccine IP waiver

Europe is now adding a million fresh Covid-19 cases every three days. In the US, at least 190,000 new cases are surfacing daily. China’s Sunday tally was at a 21-month high. And, back home in India, active cases soared past 75,000 on Monday. The world is ringing in the New Year with a sense of déjà vu. And so is the hospitality industry, which was hoping to make up for its losses amid New Year revelry.

It’s not just hospitality and tourism, the pandemic has cast its shadow on almost all sectors. The IT industry is also one of them. In a recent interview with Business Standard’s Surajeet Das Gupta, Tech Mahindra’s CEO and Managing Director CP Gurnani shared his company’s plans for growth amid the ongoing uncertainty caused by Covid-19. With half of its revenue coming from the telecom ecosystem, the IT major is now focused on 5G, software-defined networks and connected solutions.

From Tech Mahindra’s growth plans, let us now move on to what is happening in the stock market. It was a choppy trading session on Monday, with the benchmark indices recovering sharply from their day’s lows and then firming up in the latter part of the trading session. Year-end holidays across major markets and Omicron-related developments back home capped the gains. So, what’s in store for Tuesday?

Apart from raising or pouring funds into the markets, companies around the world also spend heavily on research and development (R&D) and reap the benefits of innovation, too. The intellectual property rights give them the power to produce it while barring others from replicating it. But, with humanity still in the dark about the pandemic’s future, should a few vaccine makers and countries cling on to their IP rights and deny generic firms the technologies to produce the vaccine at a mass scale. A debate has been raging around it for a while now. Let us explore more about it in this podcast.

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