The unit of Swiss food giant Nestle SA said on Wednesday that net loss for its second quarter ended June was  Rs 644 million ($10 million), compared with a profit of Rs 288 crore or Rs 2.88 billion a year earlier.

Global rice prices are likely to surge by 10 percent to 20 percent in the next few months as an El Nino weather pattern grips top producers in Asia, baking the region's croplands and whittling down stocks of the grain to multi-year lows. While higher prices of a key staple would be bad news for impoverished countries in Asia and Africa, lower output will help No.2 exporter Thailand offload its bulging stockpiles that have weighed on the rice market and pushed benchmark pricesdown to 7-1/2-year lows of $367.50 per tonne in June.

The Central Board of Excise and Customs said businesses can store documents in electronic form and allowed digitally signed invoices, a move aimed at improving ease of doing business and reducing cost of transaction.
As part of the government's initiative to facilitate trade, CBEC has been taking several steps towards ease of doing business, the Finance Ministry said in a statement.One such recent initiative has been to encourage the trade to replace paper documents required by law to be preserved with electronic documents and to use digitally signed invoices in Central Excise and Service Tax.

Vedanta Ltd today reported a 35.44 per cent fall in net profit to Rs 865.94 crore for the June quarter on a consolidated basis on account of volatile commodity prices among other factors.   

Expressing reservations over the Centre's proposed gold monetisation scheme, chief of Parliamentary panel on finance Veerappa Moily on Wednesday said the government should revisit it as it is unlikely to take off with the existing conditions.     

The committee would examine the scheme as the gold industry players have submitted a memorandum before the panel raising certain doubts about it.    

After hearing the industry's views, a detail report would be placed before Parliament on the need to have a sound and proper policy on gold in the country, he added.     

To reduce the current account deficit and bring down the country's dependency on gold imports, the government in May had come out with a draft monetisation scheme that aims to monetise gold through recycling of domestic gold stock.

Gold remained weak for the second day as it fell marginally by Rs 10 to Rs 25,290 per ten grams at the bullion market today owing to slackened demand from jewellers, while ignoring a firming trend overseas.             Silver, however, recovered by Rs 150 to Rs 34,200 per kg on increased offtake by industrial units and coin makers and a higher global cues.             

General Motors Co will invest $1 billion in the next few years to turn operations in India into a new global auto manufacturing and export hub aimed at boosting sales in fast-growing emerging markets, top executives said on Wednesday.
 The investment is part of GM's plan to invest $5 billion over several years to develop a global family of Chevrolet vehicles with Shanghai Automotive Industry Corp (SAIC), the state-owned Chinese automaker that is GM's primary partner in China.
GM will also launch 10 new domestically manufactured vehicles in India over the next five years in a push to double its market share in the country by 2020.

Oil prices fell in Asian trade on Wednesday as concerns over global oversupply outweighed the impact of a likely larger than expected draw in US crude stocks and a weakening dollar.Asian investors focused on OPEC production figures that showed members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries produced around 3 million barrels of oil per day more than daily demand in the second quarter, a Reuters survey showed.