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News Corp to invest $100 m

To start six regional channels; Dow Jones India Titans 30 Index launched

— PHOTO: PAUL NORONHA

MONITORING MARKETS: Rupert Murdoch (left), Chairman and Chief Executive of News Corporation, with Robert Thomson, Managing Editor, The Wall Street Journal, addressing a press conference in Mumbai on Monday.

MUMBAI: Rupert Murdoch-promoted News Corporation will invest $100-million in the next 12-months to start six regional channels under the Star brand in India, News Corporation Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch said here on Monday .

News Corporation company Dow Jones on Monday launched the Dow Jones India Titans 30 Index. “We are unveiling the Dow Jones India Titans — a 30-stock index tracking the stock-market performance of prominent Indian companies,” Mr. Murdoch said at a press conference here. “It will be licensed to financial institutions as the basis of investment products such as exchange-traded funds,” he said. — PTI

Top five in the index

Ramnath Subbu writes from Mumbai:

The Dow Jones India Titans 30 Index measures the performance of the 30 largest and most liquid stocks listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange and the National Stock Exchange of India. The final composition of the index is based on ranking by free-float market capitalisation and 12-month average daily trading volumes.

The top five companies in the index by free float market capitalisation are Reliance Industries, Infosys Technologies, HDFC, Bharti Airtel and Larsen & Toubro. The three biggest sectors represented in the index are: financials, basic materials and oil and gas. “The growing importance of India to the world and to Dow Jones and News Corporation is obvious to all. What the world needs is a trusted means of measuring this country’s development and an index that can be used by investors around the world to track the progress of Indian companies and the Indian economy. We will see huge capital flows both from and to India in coming years and that is an opportunity for us as a financial information company, as well as for international investors who want to take advantage of this profound trend,” Mr. Murdoch said in a statement.

Mr. Murdoch also launched The Global Dow, an index whose components are selected by the editors of The Wall Street Journal. “The world is changing and how we measure that change economically and financially is clearly a challenge and an opportunity. We have seen a re-weighting of risk around the world, but the world itself is being economically rerated and so we need an index that allows investors to take advantage of these changes. Indian companies will obviously have a place in the Global Dow as will companies from other emerging countries where we have seen an unprecedented economic emancipation over the past two decades.”

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