Huawei along with its subbrand Honor had 3% share in the Indian smartphone segment, with the bulk of sales accounted by Honor.

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NEW DELHI: Your take home salary could go up leaving you more to spend — though it could be at the cost of your savings — as the government is mulling lowering the social security contribution. A labour ministry committee working on the contributory ceiling by the government towards universal social security for all workers is likely to recommend a lower contribution, a government official told ET. The committee is expected to finalise its recommendation by the end of August, the person said. Initial estimate suggests that total contribution towards social security cover could be lower by at least 2 percentage points, with employers also contributing less. The labour ministry will hold consultation with stakeholders once the committee finalises its recommendations, following which they would be incorporated in the social security code, the official said. 65219176 Currently, social security contribution is 24% of an employee’s basic salary. This include 12% employee contribution, which entirely goes to provident fund account. Employer also contributes 12%, which is split among pension account, provident fund account and deposit linked insurance scheme. This contribution could fall to 10% for both, yielding a higher take-home salary for workers. The 10% contribution is already applicable to establishments with less than 20 workers. This could be made uniform for every establishment. “We are enhancing the scale of coverage by five-fold,” the official said. “Hence, we think that going forward the contribution by and for each worker eligible for a social security cover will come down, benefitting both employee and the employer.” The government expects to increase those covered under the social security scheme to 50 crore from the current base of about 10 crore people. In majority of cases, employer’s contribution to PF and insurance is factored in workers’ cost to company pay. In such cases, reduction in employer’s contribution might also become available to the employee under some other head, boosting their take home salary further. The higher salary will be available for spending or can be saved by the worker in other instruments. Employee unions have in general not favoured reduction in the social security contribution rate, reasoning it would reduce social security cover available to workers.

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Countrywide rainfall in this monsoon season remains 6% below normal levels at the end of July, as insufficient rainfall in east and northeast regions continues to weigh down on the overall performance, the weather office has said.Rainfall in July remained 6% below normal on the back of 5% deficit in June, the first month of the monsoon season that lasts till the end of September, according to data from India Meteorological Department (IMD).This is despite 83% area of the country receiving normal rainfall since June 1. East and northeast India has recorded 27% deficit since the start of the monsoon season.The situation is expected to improve because east and northeast India are getting good rains at present. “With the ongoing spell of heavy rainfall in the region likely to continue, it will help bring down the countrywide deficit,” said D S Pai, director for long-range forecasts at IMD.Experts said that while 6% deficit is a normal deviation from the normal range, distribution of rainfall is more important. “The distribution of the rainfall is a bigger worry than the quantum,” said DK Joshi, chief economist at leading rating firm Crisil. “Deficient rainfall in east and northeast India is a worry for crops like rice,” he said.However, rainfall in key crop growing regions of Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, and Chhattisgarh has improved this month. Rainfall this week is likely to remain concentrated over east and north-eastern states, Uttar Pradesh and few states in south peninsular region. In the remaining parts of the country, however, rainfall is likely to remain patchy, weather forecasters said.“This is a normal course of monsoon, with circulation shifting from one region to another. After a week or so, rainfall over Central India is likely to increase,” said Pai of IMD.This season’s rainfall figures dwindled after the southwest monsoon saw around 12 days’ hiatus in its course of progression in the third week of June.The fear of a similar hiatus in August looms large, independent forecasters Skymet and Accuweather have warned. “A break in monsoon happens usually during the month of August and sometimes it ends up being a prolonged one,” Skymet said on Tuesday.

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NEW DELHI: Bharti Airtel’s enterprise, or `B2B arm’, will act as a major growth engine for which the company is digitising this business to spur growth and acquire new customers, a top executive said.“There’s a huge focus on the B2B part of the business. Data centres, managed services, cloud, security and IoT are a big growth engines for Airtel,” Ajay Chitkara, CEO of Airtel Business, told ET.Bharti Airtel’s enterprise business for India — Airtel Business — reported Rs 2,992.5 crore revenue for the first quarter ended June 2018, up 7% on a yearly basis.Its enterprise customer base has also increased by 1.4% yearon-year. “The process of making Bharti Airtel fully digital is not limited to the wireless part of the business alone, and we’ve extended it to our B2B side as well,” Chitkara said.Airtel aims to deliver every product riding on the digital platform for every segment and market to aggressively add new enterprise customers in India and in global markets as well.Having launched wholesale “voice on demand” to customers globally, the telco is now launching “bandwidth on demand” platform, aimed at international telcos, content companies, and startups. “The digital approach has helped Airtel get more than 300 new customers in the last three months for the wholesale voice service in 30 countries. The acquisition machinery is very fast,” Chitkara said.

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NEW DELHI: Chinese smartphone maker Huawei is aiming to be the highest selling premium smartphone in India currently ruled by Samsung, OnePlus and Apple and re-entered the segment recently with its Huawei branded P20 and P20 Pro phones, a top official said.The company is making a concerted push into the high-end segment through its “Huawei branded” smartphones, while its sub-brand, Honor, continues to compete with Xiaomi and Oppo in the sub-Rs 20K category.“Our target is to become the top player in the premium segment in India,” Allen Wang, director, product centre, Huawei India Consumer Business Group, told ET.OnePlus was the top premium smartphone brand (Rs 30,000 and above) in India, even as the overall premium phone market grew 19% on-year in the April-June quarter as more consumers upgraded to 2018 flagship launches by different Android brands in India.Huawei along with its subbrand Honor had 3% share in the Indian smartphone segment, with the bulk of sales accounted by Honor.“Huawei captured 4% of the premium smartphone segment within the first quarter of its launch, driven by Honor 10 and P20 shipments. It is using online as a channel to target premium smartphone users in Tier 1 cities,” said Tarun Pathak, research director at Counterpoint.Wang said Indian and Chinese markets are similar in terms of consumer trends.

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A few month ago, bus ticketing platform Red Bus started sending ticket details for its customers over WhatsApp, enabling users to chat with customer support executives.

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The company said on Tuesday it had removed 32 pages and accounts from Facebook and Instagram because they were involved in "coordinated inauthentic behavior".

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Amazon rolled out a new feature for Alexa that lets users send Amazon Music from their phones to speakers.

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Apple didn't forget about the iPad with iOS 12.

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Facebook Inc has identified a coordinated political influence campaign through dozens of inauthentic accounts on its platform ahead of November's U.S. midterm election, the New York Times reported separately on Tuesday.The company said on Tuesday it had removed 32 pages and accounts from Facebook and Instagram because they were involved in "coordinated inauthentic behavior"."This kind of behavior is not allowed on Facebook because we don't want people or organizations creating networks of accounts to mislead others about who they are, or what they're doing," the company said in a blogpost."We're still in the very early stages of our investigation and don't have all the facts -- including who may be behind this," Facebook said.The company told lawmakers this week that it detected the campaign as part of its investigations into election interference, the Times reported.

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By Mihir SharmaThe cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan has finally been accepted as Pakistan’s next prime minister. I say “finally” because the election commission managed to add to widespread concerns about the elections by inexplicably delaying its announcement of the outcome. Almost all of Pakistan’s parties, other than Khan’s, have contested the results; Shehbaz Sharif, the leader of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, which won the last general election, tweeted about “manifest and massive irregularities” and argued that Pakistan’s democratization has been “pushed back decades.”Sharif is right. The past year saw the disqualification of his brother Nawaz, the democratically elected prime minister, and then an election campaign that was throughout very far from fair. Most outside Pakistan will agree with Sharif and his colleagues in other parties, and question whether a government brought to power in this manner should be considered legitimate. But where does that leave the rest of the world? Pakistan’s military establishment has, through its skillful management of this election, presented the world with a problem that has no easy solution.Khan has been in the public eye for decades — for more than 20 years as an aspirant prime minister, and before that as the charismatic captain of Pakistan’s cricket team. When that team won the World Cup more than 25 years ago, Khan famously delivered a speech that was stunning in its egotism: He actually forgot to thank his young teammates. After his election victory, his teammates in the powerful establishment — the “boys,” as some Pakistanis euphemistically refer to them — will surely expect more tangible thanks.But here’s the dilemma the rest of us face. On one hand, we have to continue to support Pakistan’s democratization — which means engaging with its civilian leadership, rather than the generals in Rawalpindi. On the other hand, do we want to help legitimize a government elected with the open support of the military?You could argue that we should wait to see what sort of prime minister Khan becomes. But, frankly, our expectations should be low. Khan’s political positions in the past have been troubling — particularly his flirtation with the obscurantist religious right, which in Pakistan is very obscurantist indeed. For example, he has voted in favor of religious laws that make it impossible to prosecute rape cases. During his campaign, he projected himself as a defender of Pakistan’s stringent and illiberal blasphemy law. It’s hard to imagine a Khan-led administration starting off doing anything other than what the military would want it to do — which is to protect those who carry out attacks in Afghanistan and India, defend the army’s entrenched economic interests, and keep the fires of anti-American sentiment burning.None of this is good news for ordinary Pakistanis, or for the rest of the world. Khan’s anti-West speeches may have been strident, but reality will overtake his rhetoric. Pakistan’s economy is teetering on the brink of a balance-of-payments crisis; sooner or later, and probably sooner, the new government will have to turn to the International Monetary Fund for support. Sooner or later, but probably later, the new prime minister will also realize that the robust “new Pakistan” that he has promised his voters will need him to complete the structural reforms that his predecessors have left unfinished.After all, Nawaz Sharif himself was once a creature of the military: He rose to power as an acolyte of the military dictator Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, who ruled Pakistan in the 1980s. Sharif’s relationship with the Army, however, soured once he was in power and developed a small-business power base of his own that expected him to take on the entrenched interests that dominated Pakistan’s economy. It is not impossible that a similar dynamic will play out over the first years of Khan’s term.India and the West, therefore, should be cautious. Embracing Khan too early would be a mistake, as it would signal support for the military’s management of the electoral process. But we should be awake to any sign that Khan — a man with enough ego for an entire cricket team — is breaking with his powerful backers. After all, how long will a man like Imran Khan be satisfied by not being the captain of his own team?

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Here's why the next oven you buy should be convection.

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