@Indiaretailing: Lifestyle retailer Ebony and global furniture brand Gautier from France have collaborated to form Ebony Gautier. The resultant brand out of the joint effort has come up with its first store in Jubilee Hills in Hyderabad. The outlet spans over 8,500 sq ft and stocks range from living room selections to home furnishing and home décor solutions.

Inauguration of this store sets forward the retail expansion plan of the concern of opening more outlets across the country by the end of 2012. Setting up of this store takes the total figure of stores in India to five. These outlets constitute part of the concept of home adornment and decoration through their products like styled furniture and home furnishing accessories.

@IIFL: Dish TV, a division of Zee Network Enterprise, India’s first direct to home entertainment service, has been granted permission to raise foreign equity to the extent of INR 9.8 bn. by the finance ministry on the recommendations of the Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIBP). Dish TV has planned to utilize this capital in order to produce telecommunication equipment and provide management and marketing of ‘agrani’ services in the area of mobile satellite communications.

@TechCircle: Omnia Investments is backed by Dilip Modi of the INR 100 bn conglomerate, Spice Mobility, with a corpus of INR 200 mn to invest in early-stage education and tech start-ups. It has recently invested INR 70 mn and picked up minority stakes in candidate assessment venture, Common Job Test and higher education firm, Sunstone. Additionally, Dilip Modi has also set up a social fund called Ek Soch Mission to help entrepreneurs focusing on education, environment and mobile value-added services.

Sunstone Business School offers a one-year MBA programme spread across five modules with specific focus areas and has Dilip Modi on its executive board. Common Job Test is a candidate assessment firm that helps job-seekers to find employment by testing their job-related skills and sharing their scores with recruiters for free. Job fields include sales, marketing, admin, BPO and retail space. It also helps recruiters to increase their interview-to-conversion ratio by making quicker and better short listing decisions.

@Business Standard: Coimbatore-based Suguna Poultry Farm Limited is planning to set up a ready-to-eat chicken products plant in Bangalore. The company has decided on Bangalore as it has found Bangalore to be a logistically-ideal location. The proposed plant will need an investment of INR 250 mn and will have an annual capacity of producing 300 tons of ready to eat snacks like chicken popcorn, nuggets, fried chicken.

The company wants to reduce its revenue share from its broiler chicken to that of consumer products division. As a result the company is laying emphasis on its retail outlets primarily in South India which offers fresh chilled chicken and ready-to-eat grilled chicken. They are also planning to open 500 more franchisee owned outlets. Since the average consumption of poultry and related products in Indian is much less than the world average so there is a lot of potential to grow. The company has found high acceptance of their products in branded eggs in Bangalore, Chennai, Pune and Mumbai. They will be entering the Delhi market this month and expand to Chandigarh and Kolkata in due course. They are targeting at least 2 per cent of the table egg sales in the country by the end of next year.

@fnbnews: Organic Haus has launched its – premium retail organic store in Ahmedabad. The store boasts of a contemporary design which is brightly lit and spacious. In the outlet the customers can sample fresh juices and seasoned snacks, fruit jams and a lot of other delicacies at leisure. Organic Haus will also offer nutritional supplements to the Indian consumers. The company has primarily chosen to procure the goods from German manufacturers as they guarantee the best organic quality worldwide. However, they would like to switch over to local vendors as well in near future.

The  company wants to be present in all major cities in India via franchisee models. They are upbeat about the Indian market because of the rapid expansion of the middle class, the issues of environment protection and health-conscious nutrition are gaining significance. The company plans to open two more stores in Mumbai.