Update at 7.00 PM: Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries, said that his company and BP will jointly invest Rs 40,000 crore in India's energy sector.
"We will jointly explore options to develop differentiated fuel and mobility. We will jointly explore options for aviation fuel," Ambani said, according to a report in Business Today.
"It gives me pleasure to announce that BP and RIL will enhance their partnership to develop new products to help India's mobility market," he added.
Original story:
Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) shares were trading with gains of more than 2 percent on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) on Thursday, ahead of chairman Mukesh Ambani's press conference with BP Plc's chief executive Bob Dudley.
The RIL stock was up 2.22 percent at Rs 1,386 at around 2.20 pm on the BSE. The Sensex was down 117 points to 31,039; top losers were TCS, Mahindra and L&T.
Apart from RIL, other gainers were Wipro (up 1.74 percent) and Cipla (up 1.46 percent).
There was a media report that the two entities could buy out the 10 percent stake currently held by Niko Resources in a gas field (NEC25) in Bay of Bengal. The rest of the stake is held by RIL (60 percent and BP 30 percent).
The NEC-25 block is estimated to have 1.03 trillion cubic feet of recoverable gas reserves.
PCA against Central Bank of India, Wipro wins contract
The Reserve Bank of India invoked prompt corrective action (PCA) on Central Bank of India in view of high net NPA and negative RoA. The bank's Q4 gross NPAs rose to 17.8 percent of total loans as compared to 14.1 percent in the previous quarter, Nirmal Bang Institutional Equities said in a note on Thursday.
Wipro said on Wednesday that it had won an IT applications managed service contract from Finland-based Valmet, a developer and supplier of technologies, automation and services for pulp, paper and energy industries.
